hall, had she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Laïs hung hers, at the
foot of the pedestal of the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil, would
surely cover the face that, solitary among the cruel evidences of
Christian ferocity, silently says to the gloomy courts, to the shining
desert and the Nile:
“Once I was worshiped, but I am worshiped no longer.”
VII
KARNAK
Buildings have personalities. Some fascinate as beautiful women
fascinate; some charm as a child may charm, naïvely, simply, but
irresistibly. Some, like conquerors, men of blood and iron, without
bowels of mercy, pitiless and determined, strike awe to the soul,
mingled with the almost gasping admiration that power wakes in man. Some
bring a sense of heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like certain temples
of the Greeks, by their immense dignity, speak to the nature almost as
music speaks, and change anxiety to trust. Some tug at the hidden chords
of romance and rouse a trembling response. Some seem to be mingling
their tears with the tears of the dead; some their laughter with the
laughter of the living. The traveler, sailing up the Nile, holds
intercourse with many of these different personalities. He is sad,
perhaps, as I was with Denderah; dreams in the sun with Abydos; muses
with Luxor beneath the little, tapering minaret whence the call to
prayer drops down to be answered by the angelus bell; falls into a
reverie in
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1907, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
INTERIOR, TEMPLE OF KHUNS, KARNAK]
the “thinking place” of Rameses II, near to the giant that was once the
mightiest of all Egyptian statues; eagerly wakes to the fascination of
record at Deir-el-Bahari; worships in Edfu; by Philæ is carried into a
realm of delicate magic, where engineers are not. Each prompts him to a
different mood; each wakes in his nature a different response. And at
Karnak what is he? What mood enfolds him there? Is he sad, thoughtful,
awed, or gay?
An old lady, in a helmet and other things considered no doubt by her as
suited to Egypt rather than to herself, remarked in my hearing, with a
Scotch accent and an air of summing up, that Karnak was “very nice
indeed.” There she was wrong--Scotch and wrong. Karnak is not nice. No
temple that I have seen upon the banks of the Nile is nice. And Karnak
cannot be summed up in a phrase or in many phrases; cannot even be
adequately described in few or many words.
Long ago I saw it lighted up with colored fires one night for the
khedive, its ravaged magnificence tinted with rose and livid green and
blue, its pylons glittering with artificial gold, its population of
statues, its obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dream to
things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy specters, and from these
to hard and piercing realities at the cruel will of pigmies crouching by
its walls. Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly by moonlight
after watching the sunset from the summit of the great pylon. That was
a pageant worth more than the khedive’s.
I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often
known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the Sahara
spaces. But here I was not confronted with an immensity of nature, but
with a gleaming river and an immensity of man. Beneath me was the native
village, in the heart of daylight dusty and unkempt, but now becoming
charged with velvety beauty, with the soft and heavy mystery that at
evening is born among great palm-trees. Along the path that led from it,
coming toward the avenue of sphinxes with ram’s-heads that watch forever
before the temple door, a great white camel stepped, its rider a tiny
child with a close, white cap upon his head. The child was singing to
the glory of the sunset, or was it to the glory of Amun, “the hidden
one,” once the local god of Thebes, to whom the grandest temple in the
world was dedicated? I listened to the childish, quavering voice,
twittering almost like a bird, and one word alone came up to me--the
word one hears in Egypt from all the lips that speak and sing: from the
Nubians round their fires at night, from the lithe boatmen of the lower
reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins of the desert, and the donkey
boys of the villages, from the sheik who reads one’s future in water
spilt on a plate, and the Bisharin with buttered curls who runs to sell
one beads from his tent among the sand-dunes.
[Illustration: THE GREAT TEMPLE OF KARNAK]
“Allah!” the child was singing as he passed upon his way.
Pigeons circled above their pretty towers. The bats came out, as if they
knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal lemon
color, the orange, and the red. The little obelisk beyond the last
sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change at
sunset--pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel, sycamore,
and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious
finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile began to gleam. Upon
its steel and silver torches of amber flame were lighted. The Libyan
mountains became spectral beyond the tombs of the kings. The tiny, rough
cupolas that mark a grave close to the sphinxes, in daytime dingy and
poor, now seemed made of some splendid material worthy to roof the mummy
of a king. Far off a pool of the Nile, that from here looked like a
little palm-fringed lake, turned ruby red. The flags from the standards
of Luxor, among the minarets, flew out straight against a sky that was
pale as a primrose, almost cold in its amazing delicacy.
I turned, and behind me the moon was risen. Already its silver rays fell
upon the ruins of Karnak; upon the thickets of lotus columns; upon
solitary gateways that now give entrance to no courts; upon the sacred
lake, with its reeds, where the black water-fowl were asleep; upon
sloping walls, shored up by enormous stanchions, like ribs of some
prehistoric leviathan; upon small chambers; upon fallen blocks of
masonry, fragments of architrave and pavement, of capital and cornice;
and upon the people of Karnak--those fascinating people who still cling
to their habitation in the ruins, faithful through misfortune,
affectionate with a steadfastness that defies the cruelty of time; upon
the little, lonely white Sphinx with the woman’s face and the
downward-sloping eyes full of sleepy seduction; upon Rameses II, with
the face of a kindly child, not of a king; upon the Sphinx, bereft of
its companion, which crouches before the kiosk of Taharga, the king of
Ethiopia; upon those two who stand together as if devoted, yet by their
attitudes seem to express characters diametrically opposed, gray men and
vivid, the one with folded arms calling to Peace, the other with arms
stretched down in a gesture of crude determination, summoning War, as if
from the under-world; upon the granite foot and ankle in the temple of
Rameses III, which in their perfection, like the headless Victory in
Paris, and the Niobide Chiaramonti in the Vatican, suggest a great
personality, compose a great personality that once met with is not to be
forgotten: upon these and their companions, who would not forsake the
halls and courts where once they dwelt with splendor, where now they
dwell with ruin that attracts the gaping world. The moon was risen, but
the west was still full of color and light. It faded. There was a
pause.
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE SACRED LOTUS IN THE TEMPLE AT KARNAK]
Only a bar of dull red, holding a hint of brown, lay where the sun had
sunk. And minutes passed--minutes for me full of silent expectation,
while the moonlight grew a little stronger, a few more silver rays
slipped down upon the ruins. I turned toward the east. And then came
that curious crescendo of color and of light which, in Egypt, succeeds
the diminuendo of color and of light that is the prelude to the pause
before the afterglow. Everything seemed to be in subtle movement,
heaving as a breast heaves with the breath; swelling slightly, as if in
an effort to be more, to attract attention, to gain in significance.
Pale things became livid, holding apparently some under-brightness which
partly penetrated its envelop, but a brightness that was white and
almost frightful. Black things seemed to glow with blackness. The air
quivered. Its silence surely thrilled with sound--with sound that grew
ever louder.
In the east I saw an effect. To the west I turned for the cause. The
sunset light was returning. Horus would not permit Tum to reign even for
a few brief moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of the moon, would be
witness of a conflict in that lovely western region of the ocean of the
sky where the bark of the sun had floated away beneath the mountain rim
upon the red-and-orange tides. The afterglow was like an exquisite
spasm, is always like an exquisite spasm, a beautiful, almost desperate
effort ending in the quiet darkness of defeat. And through that
spasmodic effort a world lived for some minutes with a life that seemed
unreal, startling, magical. Color returned to the sky--color ethereal,
trembling as if it knew it ought not to return. Yet it stayed for a
while and even glowed, though it looked always strangely purified, and
full of a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were no
longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised surely by a supreme
artist to heighten here and there the beauty of the sky. Everything that
moved against the afterglow--man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog
and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse--became at once an
ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving
it, the color in which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched serenely,
as if he knew the end. And almost suddenly the miraculous effort failed.
Things again revealed their truth, whether commonplace or not. That pool
of the Nile was no more a red jewel set in a feathery pattern of strange
design, but only water fading from my sight beyond a group of palms. And
that below me was only a camel going homeward, and that a child leading
a bronze-colored sheep with a curly coat, and that a dusty flat-roofed
hovel, not the fairy home of jinn, or the abode of some magician working
marvels with the sun-rays he had gathered in his net. The air was no
longer thrilling with music. The breast that had heaved with a divine
breath was still as the breast of a corpse.
And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of Karnak.
Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under many kings its ruins
are as complex as were probably once its completed temples, with their
shrines, their towers, their courts, their hypostyle halls. As I looked
down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made more
touching than in daytime, those alluring complexities, brought by the
night and Khuns into a unity that was both tender and superb. Masses of
masonry lay jumbled in shadow and in silver; gigantic walls cast sharply
defined gloom; obelisks pointed significantly to the sky, seeming, as
they always do, to be murmuring a message; huge doorways stood up like
giants unafraid of their loneliness and yet pathetic in it; here was a
watching statue, there one that seemed to sleep, seen from afar. Yonder
Queen Hatshepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el-Bahari, and who is more
familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left her traces, and nearer, to the
right, Rameses III had made a temple, surely for the birds, so fond they
are of it, so pertinaciously they haunt it. Rameses II, mutilated and
immense, stood on guard before the terrific hall of Seti I; and between
him and my platform in the air rose the solitary lotus column that
prepares you for the wonder of Seti’s hall, which otherwise might almost
overwhelm you--unless you are a Scotch lady in a helmet. And Khuns had
his temple here by the Sphinx of the twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who
created “the sun egg and the moon egg,” and who was said--only said,
alas!--to have established on earth the “everlasting justice,” had his,
and still their stones receive the silver moon-rays and wake the wonder
of men. Thothmes III, Thothmes I, Shishak, who smote the kneeling
prisoners and vanquished Jeroboam, Medamut and Mut, Amenhotep I, and
Amenhotep II--all have left their records or been celebrated at Karnak.
Purposely I mingled them in my mind--did not attempt to put them in
their proper order, or even to disentangle gods and goddesses from
conquerors and kings. In the warm and seductive night Khuns whispered to
me: “As long ago at Bekhten I exorcized the demon from the suffering
Princess, so now I exorcize from these ruins all spirits but my own.
To-night these ruins shall suggest nothing but majesty, tranquillity,
and beauty. Their records are for Ra, and must be studied by his rays.
In mine they shall speak not to the intellect, but only to the emotions
and the soul.”
And presently I went down, and yielding a complete and happy obedience
to Khuns, I wandered alone through the stupendous vestiges of past eras,
dead ambitions, vanished glory, and long-outworn belief, and I ignored
eras, ambitions, glory, and belief, and thought only of form, and
height, of the miracle of blackness against silver, and of the pathos of
statues whose ever-open eyes at night, when one is near them,
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO TEMPLE OF RAMESES III, KARNAK]
suggest the working of some evil spell, perpetual watchfulness, combined
with eternal inactivity, the unslumbering mind caged in the body that is
paralyzed.
There is a temple at Karnak that I love, and I scarcely know why I care
for it so much. It is on the right of the solitary lotus column before
you come to the terrific hall of Seti. Some people pass it by, having
but little time, and being hypnotized, it seems, by the more astounding
ruin that lies beyond it. And perhaps it would be well, on a first
visit, to enter it last; to let its influence be the final one to rest
upon your spirit. This is the temple of Rameses III, a brown place of
calm and retirement, an ineffable place of peace. Yes, though the birds
love it and fill it often with their voices, it is a sanctuary of peace.
Upon the floor the soft sand lies, placing silence beneath your
footsteps. The pale brown of walls and columns, almost yellow in the
sunshine, is delicate and soothing, and inclines the heart to calm.
Delicious, suggestive of a beautiful tapestry, rich and ornate, yet
always quiet, are the brown reliefs upon the stone. What are they? Does
it matter? They soften the walls, make them more personal, more tender.
That surely is their mission. This temple holds for me a spell. As soon
as I enter it, I feel the touch of the lotus, as if an invisible and
kindly hand swept a blossom lightly across my face and downward to my
heart. This courtyard, these small chambers beyond it, that last doorway
framing a lovely darkness, soothe me even more than the terra-cotta
hermitages of the Certosa of Pavia. And all the statues here are calm
with an irrevocable calmness, faithful through passing years with a very
sober faithfulness to the temple they adorn. In no other place, one
feels it, could they be thus at peace, with hands crossed forever upon
their breasts which are torn by no anxieties, thrilled by no joys. As
one stands among them, or, sitting on the base of a column in the
chamber that lies beyond them, looks on them from a little distance,
their attitude is like a summons to men to contend no more, to be still,
to enter into rest.
Come to this temple when you leave the hall of Seti. There you are in a
place of triumph. Scarlet, some say, is the color of a great note
sounded on a bugle. This hall is like a bugle-call of the past,
thrilling even now down all the ages with a triumph that is surely
greater than any other triumph. It suggests blaze--blaze of scarlet,
blaze of bugle, blaze of glory, blaze of life and time, of ambition and
achievement. In these columns, in the putting up of them, dead men
sought to climb to sun and stars, limitless in desire, limitless in
industry, limitless in will. And at the tops of the columns blooms the
lotus, the symbol of rising. What a triumph in stone this hall was once,
what a triumph in stone its ruin is to-day! Perhaps, among temples, it
is the most wondrous thing in all Egypt, as it was no doubt the most
wondrous temple in the world;
[Illustration: THE SACRED LAKE, KARNAK]
among temples, I say, for the Sphinx is of all the marvels of Egypt by
far the most marvelous. The grandeur of this hall almost moves one to
tears, like the marching past of conquerors, stirs the heart with
leaping thrills at the capacities of men. Through the thicket of
columns, tall as forest trees, the intense blue of the African sky
stares down, and their great shadows lie along the warm and sunlit
ground. Listen! There are voices chanting. Men are working here--working
as men worked how many thousands of years ago. But these are calling
upon the Mohammedan’s god as they slowly drag to the appointed places
the mighty blocks of stone. And it is to-day a Frenchman who oversees
them.
“Help! Help! Allah give us help!
Help! Help! Allah give us help!”
The dust flies up about their naked feet. Triumph and work; work
succeeded by the triumph all can see. I like to hear the workmen’s
voices within the hall of Seti. I like to see the dust stirred by their
tramping feet.
And then I like to go once more to the little temple, to enter through
its defaced gateway, to stand alone in its silence between the rows of
statues with their arms folded upon their quiet breasts, to gaze into
the tender darkness beyond,--the darkness that looks consecrated,--to
feel that peace is more wonderful than triumph, that the end of things
is peace.
Triumph and deathless peace, the bugle-call and silence--these are the
notes of Karnak.
VIII
LUXOR
Upon the wall of the great court of Amenhotep III in the temple of Luxor
there is a delicious dancing procession in honor of Rameses II. It is
very funny and very happy; full of the joy of life--a sort of radiant
cake-walk of old Egyptian days. How supple are these dancers! They seem
to have no bones. One after another they come in line upon the mighty
wall, and each one bends backward to the knees of the one who follows.
As I stood and looked at them for the first time, almost I heard the
twitter of flutes, the rustic wail of the African hautboy, the
monotonous boom of the derabukkeh, cries of a far-off gaiety such as one
often hears from the Nile by night. But these cries came down the long
avenues of the centuries; this gaiety was distant in the vasty halls of
the long-dead years. Never can I think of Luxor without thinking of
those happy dancers, without thinking of the life that goes in the sun
on dancing feet.
There are a few places in the world that one associates with happiness,
that one remembers always with a smile, a little thrill at the heart
that whispers, “There
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR FROM THE EASTERLY PYLON]
joy is.” Of these few places Luxor is one--Luxor the home of sunshine,
the suave abode of light, of warmth, of the sweet days of gold and
sheeny, golden sunsets, of silver, shimmering nights through which the
songs of the boatmen of the Nile go floating to the courts and the tombs
of Thebes. The roses bloom in Luxor under the mighty palms. Always
surely beneath the palms there are the roses. And the lateen-sails come
up the Nile, looking like white-winged promises of future golden days.
And at dawn one wakes with hope and hears the songs of the dawn; and at
noon one dreams of the happiness to come; and at sunset one is swept
away on the gold into the heart of the golden world; and at night one
looks at the stars, and each star is a twinkling hope. Soft are the airs
of Luxor; there is no harshness in the wind that stirs the leaves of the
palms. And the land is steeped in light. From Luxor one goes with
regret. One returns to it with joy on dancing feet.
One day I sat in the temple, in the huge court with the great double row
of columns that stands on the banks of the Nile and looks so splendid
from it. The pale brown of the stone became almost yellow in the
sunshine. From the river, hidden from me, stole up the songs of the
boatmen. Nearer at hand I heard pigeons cooing, cooing in the sun, as if
almost too glad, and seeking to manifest their gladness. Behind me,
through the columns, peeped some houses of the village: the white home
of Ibrahim Ayyad, the perfect dragoman, grandson of Mustapha Aga, who
entertained me years ago, and whose house stood actually within the
precincts of the temple; houses of other fortunate dwellers in Luxor
whose names I do not know. For the village of Luxor crowds boldly about
the temple, and the children play in the dust almost at the foot of
obelisks and statues. High on a brown hump of earth a buffalo stood
alone, languishing serenely in the sun, gazing at me through the columns
with light eyes that were full of a sort of folly of contentment. Some
goats tripped by, brown against the brown stone--the dark brown earth of
the native houses. Intimate life was here, striking the note of the
coziness of Luxor. Here was none of the sadness and the majesty of
Denderah. Grand are the ruins of Luxor, noble is the line of columns
that boldly fronts the Nile; but Time has given them naked to the air
and to the sun, to children and to animals. Instead of bats, the pigeons
fly about them. There is no dreadful darkness in their sanctuaries.
Before them the life of the river, behind them the life of the village
flows and stirs. Upon them looks down the Minaret of Abu Haggag; and as
I sat in the sunshine, the warmth of which began to lessen, I saw upon
its lofty circular balcony the figure of the muezzin. He leaned over,
bending toward the temple and the statues of Rameses II and the happy
dancers on the wall. He opened his lips and cried to them:
[Illustration: THE COURT OF AMENHOTEP III, TEMPLE OF LUXOR]
“God is great. God is great.... I bear witness that there is no god but
God.... I bear witness that Mohammed is the Apostle of God.... Come to
prayer! Come to prayer!... God is great. God is great. There is no god
but God.”
He circled round the minaret. He cried to the Nile. He cried to the
Colossi sitting in their plain, and to the yellow precipices of the
mountains of Libya. He cried to Egypt:
“Come to prayer! Come to prayer! There is no god but God. There is no
god but God.”
The days of the gods were dead, and their ruined temple echoed with the
proclamation of the one God of the Moslem world. “Come to prayer! Come
to prayer!” The sun began to sink.
Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me.
The voice of the muezzin died away. There was a silence; and then, as if
in answer to the cry from the minaret, I heard the chime of the angelus
bell from the Catholic church of Luxor.
Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark.
I sat very still. The light was fading; all the yellow was fading, too,
from the columns and the temple walls. I stayed till it was dark; and
with the dark the old gods seemed to resume their interrupted sway. And
surely they, too, called to prayer. For do not these ruins of old Egypt,
like the muezzin upon the minaret, like the angelus bell in the church
tower, call one to prayer in the night? So wonderful are they under
stars and moon that they stir the fleshly and the worldly desires that
lie like drifted leaves about the reverence and the aspiration that are
the hidden core of the heart. And it is released from its burden; and it
awakes and prays.