“And now we galloped forward, through a long procession of camels,
donkeys, and desert Arabs armed with spears, toward Karnak, the greatest
ruin in the world, the crowning triumph of Egyptian power and Egyptian
art. Except a broken stone here and there protruding through the soil,
the plain is as desolate as if it had never been conscious of a human
dwelling; and only on reaching the vicinity of the mud hamlet of Karnak,
can the traveler realize that he is in Thebes. Here the camel-path drops
into a broad excavated avenue, lined with fragments of sphinxes and
shaded by starveling acacias. As you advance, the sphinxes are better
preserved and remain seated on their pedestals, but they have all been
decapitated. Though of colossal proportions, they are seated so close to
each other, that it must have required _nearly two thousand_ to form the
double row to Luxor. The avenue finally reaches a single pylon, of
majestic proportions, built by one of the Ptolemies, and covered with
profuse hieroglyphics. Passing through this, the sphinxes lead you to
another pylon, followed by a pillared court and a temple built by the
later Remesides. This, I thought, while my friend was measuring the
girth of the pillars, is a good beginning for Karnak, but it is
certainly much less than I expect. ‘_Tāāl min hennee!_’ (come this way!)
called the guide, as if reading my mind, and led me up the heaps of
rubbish to the roof and pointed to the north. Ah, there was Karnak! Had
I been blind up to this time, or had the earth suddenly heaved out of
her breast the remains of the glorious temple? From all parts of the
plain of Thebes I had seen it in the distance—a huge propylon, a
shattered portico, and an obelisk, rising above the palms. Whence this
wilderness of ruins, spreading so far as to seem a city rather than a
temple; pylon after pylon, tumbling into enormous cubes of stone, long
colonnades, supporting fragments of Titanic roofs, obelisks of red
granite, and endless walls and avenues, branching out to isolated
portals? Yet they stood as silently amid the accumulated rubbish of
nearly four thousand years, and the sunshine threw its yellow luster as
serenely over the despoiled sanctuaries, as if it had never been
otherwise since the world began. Figures are of no use, in describing a
place like this, but since I must use them, I may say that the length of
the ruins before us, from west to east, was twelve hundred feet, and
that the total circumference of Karnak, including its numerous pylæ, or
gateways, is a mile and a half.
“We mounted and rode with fast-beating hearts to the western or main
entrance, facing the Nile. The two towers of the propylon (pyramidal
masses of solid stone) are three hundred and twenty-nine feet in length,
and the one which is least ruined, is nearly one hundred feet in hight.
On each side of the sculptured portal connecting them, is a tablet left
by the French army, recording the geographical position of the principal
Egyptian temples. We passed through, and entered an open court, more
than three hundred feet square, with a corridor of immense pillars on
each side, connecting it with the towers of a second pylon, nearly as
gigantic as the first. A colonnade of lofty shafts, leading through the
center of the court, once united the two entrances, but they have all
been hurled down, and lay as they fell, in long lines of disjointed
blocks, except one, which holds its solitary lotus-bell against the sky.
Two mutilated colossi of red granite still guard the doorway, whose
lintel-stones are forty feet in length. Climbing over the huge fragments
which have fallen from above and almost blocked up the passage, we
looked down into the grand hall of the temple. I knew the dimensions of
this hall, beforehand; I knew the number and size of the pillars, but I
was no more prepared for the reality than those will be, who may read
this account of it and afterward visit Karnak for themselves. It is the
great good luck of travel that many things must be seen to be known.
Nothing could have compensated for the loss of that overwhelming
confusion of awe, astonishment, and delight, which came upon me like a
flood. I looked down an avenue of twelve pillars, six on each side, each
of which was thirty-six feet in circumference and nearly eighty feet in
hight. Crushing as were these ponderous masses of sculptured stone, the
spreading bell of the lotus-blossoms which crowned them, clothed them
with an atmosphere of lightness and grace. In front, over the top of
another pile of colossal blocks, two obelisks rose sharp and clear, with
every emblem legible on their polished sides. On each side of the main
aisle are seven other rows of columns, _one hundred and twenty-two_ in
all; each of which is about fifty feet high and twenty-seven in
circumference. They have the Osiride form, without capitals, and do not
range with the central shafts. In the efforts of the conquerors to
overthrow them, two have been hurled from their places and thrown
against the neighboring ones, where they still lean, as if weary with
holding up the roof of massive sandstone. I walked alone through this
hall, trying to bear the weight of its unutterable majesty and beauty.
That I had been so oppressed by Dendera, seemed a weakness which I was
resolved to conquer, and I finally succeeded in looking on Karnak with a
calmness more commensurate with its sublime repose; but not by daylight.
My next visit was at night, at the time of the full moon. There was a
wan haze in the air, and a pale halo around the moon, on each side of
which appeared two faint mock-moons. It was a ghostly light, and the
fresh north wind, coming up the Nile, rustled solemnly in the
palm-trees. We trotted silently to Karnak, and leaped our horses over
the fragments until we reached the foot of the first obelisk. Here we
dismounted and entered the grand hall of pillars. There was no sound in
all the temple, and the guide, who seemed to comprehend my wish, moved
behind me as softly as a shadow, and spoke not a word. It needs this
illumination to comprehend Karnak. The unsightly rubbish has
disappeared: the rents in the roof are atoned for by the moonlight they
admit; the fragments shivered from the lips of the mighty capitals are
only the crumpled edges of the flower; a maze of shadows hides the
desolation of the courts, but every pillar and obelisk, pylon and
propylon is glorified by the moonlight. The soul of Karnak is soothed
and tranquillized. Its halls look upon you no longer with an aspect of
pain and humiliation. Every stone seems to say: ‘I am not fallen, for I
have defied the ages. I am a part of that grandeur which has never seen
its peer, and I shall endure forever, for the world has need of me.’ I
climbed to the roof, and sat looking down into the hushed and awful
colonnades, till I was thoroughly penetrated with their august and
sublime expression. I should probably have remained all night, an
amateur colossus, with my hands on my knees, had not the silence been
disturbed by two arrivals of romantic tourists, an Englishman and two
Frenchmen. We exchanged salutations, and I mounted my restless mare
again, touched her side with the stirrup, and sped back to Luxor. The
guide galloped beside me, occasionally hurling his spear into the air
and catching it as it fell, delighted with my readiness to indulge his
desert whims. I found the captain and sailors all ready and my friend
smoking his pipe on deck. In half an hour we had left Thebes.”
Such is a faint view of these ruins of forty centuries, the remains of
that splendid city, Thebes, in comparison with which New York is but an
infant to the mighty giant! “Yes, proud upstart of _this_ nineteenth
century,” says Thompson, “the so-called Empire city, commercial emporium
of the west, great metropolis of the new world, if thy rivers should
sweep over and bury thee, not all the stone of the Croton reservoir, and
the city hall, and the Astor house, and of a hundred churches forsooth,
would make one pile like Karnak; nor could any of these furnish a single
stone for the lintels of its gates. Yet Karnak, which began to be in
that _other_ nineteenth century _before_ Christ, is not yet a ruin! Its
gateways stand; its grand hall stands, its columns nearly all unbroken,
and not one spire of grass, or tuft of moss, or leaf of ivy, hides its
speaking sculptures. Only the sand has covered them; and when this is
removed, they are as fresh as yesterday.”
“Such is the skeleton of Thebes, as we can reconstruct it of such
materials and from such localities as yet mark its site. But what was
Thebes when, resting upon the Lybian mountains on the west and the
Arabian on the east, with the Nile flowing through its center, it filled
a circuit of twenty-five miles in a plain of twice that area, teeming
with fertility! What was Thebes when she could pour forth twenty
thousand chariots of war, and when the grand triumphal procession of
priests, and officers of state, and soldiers, and captives, swept
through these colossal avenues to grace the conqueror’s return! What was
Thebes when, by the way of the Red sea, Arabia and the Indies poured all
their commerce into her lap, and the Nile brought her the spoils of
Ethiopia and of the great sea! What was Thebes when she possessed
wealth, and mechanic arts, and physical force, to rear such monuments
even in the midst of war, and sometimes more than one in the reign of a
single monarch! What was Thebes, with all the arts and inventions of
civilized life that are sculptured upon the tombs of her kings to mark
the progress of their day; from building arches and bridges, to
glass-blowing and porcelain manufactures, to the making of umbrellas,
fans, chairs, and divans, fine linens, and all the appurtenances of a
modern drawing-room! What was Thebes when all merchants resorted thither
from Persia, from Ethiopia, from Lybia, and the Levant! What was Thebes
when the artists and scholars of infant Greece and Rome went thither to
school! Was not Egypt the mother of nations? Where is the art of Greece
or Rome that was not tutored in Egypt; that has not simply graced
Egyptian forms—nor always this? Where is the philosophy of Greece or
Rome that was not borrowed from Egypt? Even the divine Plato, who only
waited for the true Logos, learned at Egypt’s shrine. Egypt gave birth
to art, gave birth to thought, before Greece and Rome were born. She was
the grand repository of human power; the originator of all great forms
of human development; the originator, the inventor, the great prototype
of the world’s history, here laid up in her hieroglyphic archives. In
all material things, yes, and in all great intellectual forms, in
poetry, in art, in philosophy, in science, and in the religion of
nature, this nineteenth century is but the recipient of the mighty past.
Whatever she has of these, she but inherits through Rome and Greece from
their old mother Egypt. What she has better than these, she has by gift
divine, through that Christianity which purifies, enfranchises, and
ennobles man, reforms society, and makes free the state. If she hold
fast by this, she will become resplendent with a glory that Egypt never
knew; but if she slight this, and sell her birthright for luxury and
power, the meanest grave at Thebes would suffice to bury this nineteenth
century with its boasted inventions.“