Without conviction now, we make our way towards another temple,
guaranteed solitary.
Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in
the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again
into their folds.
Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis
of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II. But the sands have
covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to
preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts. Men in
their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins,
protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve
feet from the ground. In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures
have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders
have disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to
have preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated
pantomime of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange,
more striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they
have preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of
their antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their
robes of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow.
It is an artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by
remaining perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people
did seems as if made for immortality.
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