IN THE TEMPLE OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND JOY
It is the month of March, but as gay and splendid as in our June. Around
us are fields of corn, of lucerne, and the flowering bean. And the
air is full of restless birds, singing deliriously for very joy in
the voluptuous business of their nests and coveys. Our way lies over a
fertile soil, saturated with vital substances--some paradise for beasts
no doubt, for they swarm on every side: flocks of goats with a
thousand bleating kids; she-asses with their frisking young; cows and
cow-buffaloes feeding their calves; all turned loose among the crops, to
browse at their leisure, as if there were here a superabundance of the
riches of the soil.
What country is this that shows no sign of human habitation, that
knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at
home--wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air with
its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky and, in
the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these fertile plains,
that might be those of some “Promised Land,” seem to be bounded far
away, on left and right, by two parallel stone walls, two chains of
rose-coloured mountains, whose aspect is obviously desertlike. Besides,
amongst the numerous animals that are familiar, there are camels,
feeding their strange nurslings that look like four-legged ostriches.
And finally some peasants appear beyond in the cornfields; they are
veiled in long black draperies. It is the East then, an African land, or
some oasis of Arabia?
The sun at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that
stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other,
like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems
to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful
light of the fields we traverse--these fields intoxicated with life
and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the distant
landscape, unshaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more incisive
clearness and the desert beyond seems deluged with rays.
The pathway that we have been following, ill defined as it is in the
grassy fields, leads us at length under a large ruinous portico--a
relic of goodness knows what olden days--which still rises here, quite
isolated, altogether strange and unexpected, in the midst of the green
expanse of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from a great distance, so
pure and clear is the air; and in approaching it we perceive that it is
colossal, and in relief on its lintel is designed a globe with two long
wings outspread symmetrically.
It behoves us now to make obeisance with almost religious reverence, for
this winged disc is a symbol which gives at length an indication of
the place immediate and absolute. It is Egypt, the country--Egypt,
our ancient mother. And there before us must once have stood a temple
reverenced of the people, or some great vanished town; its fragments
of columns and sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields of
lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that this land of ancient splendours,
which never ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously fertile,
should have returned, for some hundreds of years now, to the humble
pastoral life of the peasants.
Through the green crops and the assembled herds our pathway seems to
lead to a kind of hill rising alone in the midst of the plains--a hill
which is neither of the same colour nor the same nature as the mountains
of the surrounding deserts. Behind us the portico recedes little by
little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as mournful and
solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of meadows, which
spread their peace where once was a centre of magnificence.
The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts--the wind of Egypt that never
seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of the
sun. The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its young
quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one another and
turn their backs to the squall.
As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of
ruins. And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are the
remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here for
some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of time in
the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become in time
mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and sometimes
even in the submerging sands.
A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses; a
heap of broken jars or amphorae--myriads of them--that served to carry
the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of walls,
repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with hieroglyphs lie
upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or Coptic sculptures
or Roman capitals. In our countries, where the past is of yesterday, we
have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead things.
Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill
of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on
all sides like a jealous rampart. Until recently indeed they covered it
almost to its roof. From the very first its appearance is disconcerting:
it is so grand, so austere and gloomy. A strange dwelling, to be sure,
for the Goddess of Love and Joy. It seems more fit to be the home of
the Prince of Darkness and of Death. A severe doorway, built of gigantic
stones and surmounted by a winged disc, opens on to an asylum of
religious mystery, on to depths where massive columns disappear in the
darkness of deep night.
Immediately on entering there is a coolness and a resonance as of a
sepulchre. First, the pronaos, where we still see clearly, between
pillars carved with hieroglyphs. Were it not for the large human faces
which serve for the capitals of the columns, and are the image of the
lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this temple of the decadent
epoch would scarcely differ from those built in this country two
thousand years before. It has the same square massiveness.
And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with
stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in
bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who
gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands--eternally
the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere--in the
palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri of
the mummies.
The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many
centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in
consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs,
their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious
mystery. But in the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the contrary, except
for some figures mutilated by the hammers of Christians or Moslems,
everything has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still throw their
fearsome shadows.
The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos. Then come,
one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the daylight
enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting the
superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the walls.
And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of this
heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep gloom.
The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the “Hall of Mystery” and
formerly the high priest _alone, and he only once in each year_, had the
right to enter it for the performance of some now unknown rites.
The “Hall of Mystery” is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the
emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it. The meagre
little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness
which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the most
they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast rectangular
cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among themselves their
disconcerting mute conversations.
Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian
era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the
world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating past,
and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its gods
upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even its
religious rites and its mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here, which
reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although they had
already discovered the _vault_, followed here the primitive models, and
continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs, placed flat,
like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built though it was in
the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site venerable in the oldest
antiquity, recalls at first sight some conception of the Ramses.
If, however, you examine it more closely, there appears, particularly in
the thousands of figures in bas-relief, a considerable divergence. The
poses are the same indeed, and so too are the traditional gestures. But
the exquisite grace of line is gone, as well as the hieratic calm of the
expressions and the smiles. In the Egyptian art of the best periods the
slender figures are as pure as the flowers they hold in their hands;
their muscles may be indicated in a precise and skilful manner, but they
remain, for all that, immaterial. The god Amen himself, the procreator,
drawn often with an absolute crudity, would seem chaste compared with
the hosts of this temple. For here, on the contrary, the figures might
be those of living people, palpitating and voluptuous, who had posed
themselves for sport in these consecrated attitudes. The throat of the
beautiful goddess, her hips, her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with
a searching and lingering realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver.
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.
*****
In one of the vestibules that we have to traverse on our way out of
the sanctuary, amongst the numerous bas-reliefs representing various
sovereigns paying homage to the beautiful Hathor, is one of a young man,
crowned with a royal tiara shaped like the head of a uraeus. He is shown
seated in the traditional Pharaonic pose and is none other than the
Emperor Nero!
The hieroglyphs of the cartouche are there to affirm his identity,
albeit the sculptor, not knowing his actual physiognomy, has given him
the traditional features, regular as those of the god Horus. During the
centuries of the Roman domination the Western emperors used to send from
home instructions that their likeness should be placed on the walls
of the temples, and that offerings should be made in their name to the
Egyptian divinities--and this notwithstanding that in their eyes Egypt
must have seemed so far away, a colony almost at the end of the earth.
(And it was such a goddess as this, of secondary rank in the times of
the Pharaohs, that was singled out as the favourite of the Romans of the
decadence.)
The Emperor Nero! As a matter of fact at the very time these
bas-reliefs--almost the last--and these expiring hieroglyphics were
being inscribed, the confused primitive theogonies had almost reached
their end and the days of the Goddess of Joy were numbered. There had
been conceived in Judaea symbols more lofty and more pure, which were to
rule a great part of the world for two thousand years--afterwards,
alas, to decline in their turn; and men were about to throw themselves
passionately into renunciation, asceticism and fraternal pity.
How strange it is to say! Even while the sculptor was carving this
archaic bas-relief, and was using, for the engraving of its name,
characters that dated back to the night of the ages, there were already
Christians assembled in the catacombs at Rome and dying in ecstasy in
the arena!