Nothing Dishonours The
Halls Of The Interior, Where Silence Has Again Descended, The Vast
Silence Of The Noon Of The Desert.
In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, men already marvelled at this
temple, as at a relic of the most distant and nebulous past.
The
geographer Strabo wrote in those days: "It is an admirable palace
built in the fashion of the Labyrinth save that it has fewer
galleries." There are galleries enough however, and one can readily
lose oneself in its mazy turnings. Seven chapels, consecrated to
Osiris and to different gods and goddesses of his suite; seven vaulted
chambers; seven doors for the processions of kings and multitudes;
and, at the sides, numberless halls, corridors, secondary chapels,
dark chambers and hidden doorways. That very primitive column,
suggestive of reeds, which is called in architecture the "plant
column" and resembles a monstrous stem of papyrus, rises here in a
thick forest, to support the stones of the blue ceilings, which are
strewn with stars, in the likeness of the sky of this country. In many
cases these stones are missing and leave large openings on to the real
sky above. Their massiveness, which one might have thought would
secure them an endless duration, has availed them nothing; the sun of
so many centuries has cracked them, and their own weight, then, has
brought them headlong to the ground. And floods of light now enter
through the gaps, into the very chapels where the men of old had
thought to ensure a holy gloom.
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