She And Her Spouse, The
Beautiful Horus, Son Of Iris, Contemplate Each Other, Naked, One
Before The Other, And Their Laughing Eyes Are Intoxicated With Love.
Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and
massive as so many fortresses.
They were used formerly for mysterious
and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no
corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs.
Bats are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted
in fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the
neighbouring fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that
they hang like stalactites.
Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great roofs
of the temple - staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by
loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls. And
here again are the inevitable rows of figures, carved on all the
walls, in the same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as we
ascend, making all the time the self-same signs one to another.
As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in Egyptian sunlight and
swept by a cold and bitter wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an
aviary. It is the kingdom of the sparrows, who have built their nests
in thousands in this temple of the complaisant goddess. They twitter
now all together and with all their might out of very joy of living.
It is an esplanade, this roof - a solitude paved with gigantic
flagstones. From it we see, beyond the heaps of ruins, those happy
plains, which are spread out with such a perfect serenity on the very
ground where once stood the town of Denderah, beloved of Hathor and
one of the most famous of Upper Egypt. Exquisitely green are these
plains with the new growth of wheat and lucerne and bean; and the
herds that are grouped here and there on the fresh verdure of the
level pastures, swaying now and undulating in the wind, look like so
many dark patches. And the two chains of mountains of rose-coloured
stone, that run parallel - on the east that of the desert of Arabia, on
the west that of the Libyan desert - enclose, in the distance, this
valley of the Nile, this land of plenty, which, alike in antiquity as
in our days, has excited the greed of predatory races. The temple has
also some underground dependencies or crypts into which you descend by
staircases as of dungeons; sometimes even you have to crawl through
holes to reach them. Long superposed galleries which might serve as
hiding-places for treasure; long corridors recalling those which, in
bad dreams, threaten to close in and bury you. And the innumerable
figures, of course, are here too, gesticulating on the walls; and
endless representations of the lovely goddess, whose swelling bosom,
which has preserved almost intact the flesh colour applied in the
times of the Ptolemies, we have perforce to graze as we pass.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 60 of 107
Words from 30776 to 31284
of 55391
