THEBES BY NIGHT
The feeling, almost, that you have grown suddenly smaller by entering
there, that you are dwarfed to less than human size--to such an extent
do the proportions of these ruins seem to crush you--and the illusion,
also, that the light, instead of being extinguished with the evening,
has only changed its colour, and become blue: that is what one
experiences on a clear Egyptian night, in walking between the colonnades
of the great temple at Thebes.
The place is, moreover, so singular and so terrible that its mere name
would at once cast a spell upon the spirit, even if one were ignorant
of the place itself. The hypostyle of the temple of the God Amen--that
could be no other thing but one. For this hall is unique in the world,
in the same way as the Grotto of Fingal and the Himalayas are unique.
*****
To wander absolutely alone at night in Thebes requires during the winter
a certain amount of stratagem and a knowledge of the routine of the
tourists. It is necessary, first of all, to choose a night on which the
moon rises late and then, having entered before the close of the day, to
escape the notice of the Bedouin guards who shut the gates at nightfall.
Thus have I waited with the patience of a stone Osiris, till the grand
transformation scene of the setting of the sun was played out once more
upon the ruins. Thebes, which, during the day, is almost animate by
reason of the presence of the visitors and the gangs of fellahs who,
singing the while, are busy at the diggings and the clearing away of
the rubbish, has emptied itself little by little, while the blue shadows
were mounting from the base of the monstrous sanctuaries. I watched the
people moving in a long row, like a trail of ants, towards the western
gate between the pylons of the Ptolemies, and the last of them had
disappeared before the rosy light died away on the topmost points of the
obelisks.
It seemed as if the silence and the night arrived together from beyond
the Arabian desert, advanced together across the plain, spreading out
like a rapid oil-stain; then gained the town from east to west, and rose
rapidly from the ground to the very summits of the temples. And this
march of the darkness was infinitely solemn.
For the first few moments, indeed, you might imagine that it was going
to be an ordinary night such as we know in our climate, and a sense of
uneasiness takes hold of you in the midst of this confusion of enormous
stones, which in the darkness would become a quite inextricable maze.
Oh! the horror of being lost in those ruins of Thebes and not being able
to see! But in the event the air preserved its transparency to such a
degree, and the stars began soon to scintillate so brightly that the
surrounding things could be distinguished almost as well as in the
daytime.
Indeed, now that the time of transition between the day and night
has passed, the eyes grow accustomed to the strange, blue, persistent
clearness so that you seem suddenly to have acquired the pupils of a
cat; and the ultimate effect is merely as if you saw through a smoked
glass which changed all the various shades of this reddish-coloured
country into one uniform tint of blue.
Behold me then, for some two or three hours, alone among the temples of
the Pharaohs. The tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at this
moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return till very
late, when the full moon will have risen and be shedding its clear light
upon the ruins. My post, while I waited, was high up among the ruins on
the margin of the sacred Lake of Osiris, the still and enclosed water
of which is astonishing in that it has remained there for so many
centuries. It still conceals, no doubt, numberless treasures confided
to it in the days of slaughters and pillages, when the armies of the
Persian and Nubian kings forced the thick, surrounding walls.
In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at the bottom of this
water, reflecting symmetrically the veritable ones which now scintillate
everywhere in the heavens. A sudden cold spreads over the town-mummy,
whose stones, still warm from their exposure to the sun, cool very
rapidly in this nocturnal blue which envelops them as in a shroud. I
am free to wander where I please without risk of meeting anyone, and I
begin to descend by the steps made by the falling of the granite blocks,
which have formed on all sides staircases as if for giants. On the
overturned surfaces, my hands encounter the deep, clear-cut hollows of
the hieroglyphs, and sometimes of those inevitable people, carved
in profile, who raise their arms, all of them, and make signs to one
another. On arriving at the bottom I am received by a row of statues
with battered faces, seated on thrones, and without hindrance of any
kind, and recognising everything in the blue transparency which takes
the place of day, I come to the great avenue of the palaces of Amen.
We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable to this avenue,
which passive multitudes took nearly three thousand years to construct,
expending, century after century, their innumerable energies in carrying
these stones, which our machines now could not move. And the objective
was always the same: to prolong indefinitely the perspectives of pylons,
colossi and obelisks, continuing always this same artery of temples
and palaces in the direction of the old Nile--while the latter, on the
contrary, receded slowly, from century to century, towards Libya. It
is here, and especially at night, that you suffer the feeling of having
been shrunken to the size of a pygmy. All round you rise monoliths
mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty paces to pass the base of a
single one of them. They are placed quite close together, too close,
it seems, in view of their enormity and mass. There is not enough air
between them, and the closeness of their juxtaposition disconcerts you
more, perhaps, even than their massiveness.
The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as
disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes--the hall of the
feasts of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, that this king
gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these ceilings,
of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty men? In
places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost diaphanous in the
air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in unbroken alignment
against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the destruction is bewildering;
fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in
indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered wreckage after a
world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the hand of man should
overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at different times, have
also come to shake this Cyclops palace which threatened to be eternal.
And all this--which represents such an excess of force, of movement,
of impulsion, alike for its erection as for its overthrow--all this is
tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil, although toppling as if for an
imminent downfall--tranquil forever, one might say, congealed by the
cold and by the night.
I was prepared for silence in such a place, but not for the sounds which
I commence to hear. First of all an osprey sounds the prelude, above my
head and so close to me that it holds me trembling throughout its long
cry. Then other voices answer from the depths of the ruins, voices very
diverse, but all sinister. Some are only able to mew on two long-drawn
notes: some yelp like jackals round a cemetery, and others again imitate
the sound of a steel spring slowly unwinding itself. And this concert
comes always from above. Owls, ospreys, screech-owls, all the different
kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and round eyes, and silken wings that
enable them to fly noiselessly, have their homes amongst the granites
massively upheld in the air; and they are celebrating now, each after
its own fashion, the nocturnal festival. Intermittent calls break upon
the air, and long-drawn infinitely mournful wailings, that sometimes
swell and sometimes seem to be strangled and end in a kind of sob. And
then, in spite of the sonority of the vast straight walls, in spite of
the echoes which prolong the cries, the silence obstinately returns.
Silence. The silence after all and beyond all doubt is the true master
at this hour of this kingdom at once colossal, motionless and blue--a
silence that seems to be infinite, because we know that there is
nothing around these ruins, nothing but the line of the dead sands, the
threshold of the deserts.
*****
I retrace my steps towards the west in the direction of the hypostyle,
traversing again the avenue of monstrous splendours, imprisoned and,
as it were, dwarfed between the rows of sovereign stones. There are
obelisks there, some upright, some overthrown. One like those of Luxor,
but much higher, remains intact and raises its sharp point into the sky;
others, less well known in their exquisite simplicity, are quite plain
and straight from base to summit, bearing only in relief gigantic lotus
flowers, whose long climbing stems bloom above in the half light cast
by the stars. The passage becomes narrower and more obscure, and it is
necessary sometimes to grope my way. And then again my hands encounter
the everlasting hieroglyphs carved everywhere, and sometimes the legs of
a colossus seated on its throne. The stones are still slightly warm, so
fierce has been the heat of the sun during the day. And certain of the
granites, so hard that our steel chisels could not cut them, have kept
their polish despite the lapse of centuries, and my fingers slip in
touching them.
There is now no sound. The music of the night birds has ceased. I listen
in vain--so attentively that I can hear the beating of my heart. Not a
sound, not even the buzzing of a fly. Everything is silent, everything
is ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth of the stones the air
grows colder and colder, and one gets the impression that everything
here is frozen--definitely--as in the coldness of death.
A vast silence reigns, a silence that has subsisted for centuries, on
this same spot, where formerly for three or four thousand years rose
such an uproar of living men. To think of the clamorous multitudes who
once assembled here, of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their
dying agonies. First of all the pantings of those thousands of harnessed
workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation, under the
burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other these stones,
whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts, the music of
the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and
battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world,
an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who
commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and
pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts. To think
of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these
same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny hands now rest, to
think of the beings who have touched them in passing, who have fallen by
their side in last sanguinary conflicts, without rubbing even the polish
from their changeless surfaces!
*****
I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation of
fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold. To find himself in the
dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter. It
seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which
has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very
massiveness, like the mountains. Nothing human is so vast. Nowhere on
earth have men conceived such dwellings. Columns after columns, higher
and more massive than towers, follow one another so closely, in
an excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of
suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses
of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to
advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally
small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows
preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful
ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is
cold and clear and blue.
The central bay of this hypostyle is in the same line as the road I
have been following since I left the hall of Thothmes. It prolongs and
magnifies as in an apotheosis that same long avenue, for the gods and
kings, which was the glory of Thebes, and which in the succession of the
ages nothing has contrived to equal. The columns which border it are
so gigantic[*] that their tops, formed of mysterious full-blown petals,
high up above the ground on which we crawl, are completely bathed in the
diffuse clearness of the sky. And enclosing this kind of nave on either
side, like a terrible forest, is another mass of columns--monster
columns, of an earlier style, of which the capitals close instead of
opening, imitating the buds of some flower which will never blossom.
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.
Farther on, when I have taken the road to Luxor, it is not long before I
meet, under the palm-trees and on the sands, the crowd, the main body
of the arrivals--some in carriages, some on horseback, some on donkeys.
There is a noise of voices speaking all sorts of non-Egyptian languages.
One is tempted to ask: “What is happening? A ball, a holiday, a grand
marriage?” No. The moon is full to-night at Thebes, upon the ruins. That
is all.