Sixty To The Right, Sixty To The Left, Too Close
Together For Their Size, They Grow Thick Like A Forest Of Baobabs That
Wanted Space:
They induce a feeling of oppression without possible
deliverance, of massive and mournful eternity.
[*] About 30 feet in circumference and 75 feet in height including the
capital.
And this, forsooth, was the place that I had wished to traverse alone,
without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to
follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light
even, for a blue phosphorescence, coming from the eastern horizon,
begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right,
outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings
on their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours of solitude
are nearly over.
*****
The moon! Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the
formidable friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and
there, on the bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous
trails which reveal the gods and goddesses engraved in the stone. They
were watching in myriads around me, as I knew well, - coifed, all of
them, in discs or great horns. They stare at one another with their
arms raised, spreading out their long fingers in an eager attempt at
conversation. They are numberless, these eternally gesticulating gods.
Wherever you look their forms are multiplied with a stupefying
repetition. They seem to have some mysterious secret to convey to one
another, but have perforce to remain silent, and for all the
expressiveness of their attitudes their hands do not move. And
hieroglyphs, too, repeated to infinity, envelop you on all sides like
a multiple woof of mystery.
*****
Minute by minute now, everything amongst these rigid dead things grows
more precise. Cold, hard rays penetrate through the immense ruin,
separating with a sharp incisiveness the light from the shadows. The
feeling that these stones, wearied as they were with their long
duration, might still be thoughtful, still mindful of their past,
grows less - less than it was a few moments before, far less than
during the preceding blue phantasmagoria. Under this clear, pale
light, as in the daytime, under the fire of the sun, Thebes has lost
for the moment whatever remained to it of soul; it has receded farther
into the backward of time, and appears now nothing more than a vast
gigantic fossil that excites only our wonder and our fear.
*****
But the tourists will soon be here, attracted by the moon. A league
away, in the hotels of Luxor, I can fancy how they have hurried away
from the tables, for fear of missing the celebrated spectacle. For me,
therefore, it is time to beat a retreat, and, by the great avenue
again, I direct my steps towards the pylons of the Ptolemies, where
the night guards are waiting.
They are busy already, these Bedouins, in opening the gates for some
tourists, who have shown their permits, and who carry Kodaks,
magnesium to light up the temples - quite an outfit in short.
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