From Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, Judge of the Dead, I came
to Denderah, the great temple of the “Lady of the Underworld,” as the
goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she was usually worshipped
as the Egyptian Aphrodite, goddess of joy, goddess of love and
loveliness. It was early morning when I went ashore. The sun was above
the eastern hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of plaited grass, sent me
half shyly the greeting, “May your day be happy!”
Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of all the gifts of the gods, as
those who wore the lotus-blossom amulet believed thousands of years ago,
and Denderah, appropriately, is a very young Egyptian temple,
probably, indeed, the youngest of all the temples on the Nile. Its
youthfulness--it is only about two thousand years of age--identifies it
happily with the happiness and beauty of its presiding deity, and as I
rode toward it on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the morning,
I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred Persea-tree. When
Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of the Persea-tree the name of king or
conqueror, he gained everlasting life. Was it the life of youth? An
everlasting life of middle age might be a doubtful benefit. And then
mentally I added, “unless one lived in Egypt.” For here the years drop
from one, and every golden hour brings to one surely another drop of
the wondrous essence that sets time at defiance and charms sad thoughts
away.
Unlike White Abydos, White Denderah stands apart from habitations, in
a still solitude upon a blackened mound. From far off I saw the façade,
large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as complete as that of
Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of the plain of brown, alluvial soil
that was broken here and there by a sharp green of growing things. There
was something of sadness in the scene, and again I thought of Hathor as
the “Lady of the Underworld,” some deep-eyed being, with a pale brow,
hair like the night, and yearning, wistful hands stretched out in
supplication. There was a hush upon this place. The loud and vehement
cry of the shadoof-man died away. The sakieh droned in my ears no more
like distant Sicilian pipes playing at Natale. I felt a breath from the
desert. And, indeed, the desert was near--that realistic desert which
suggests to the traveller approaches to the sea, so that beyond each
pallid dune, as he draws near it, he half expects to hear the lapping of
the waves. Presently, when, having ascended that marvellous staircase
of the New Year, walking in procession with the priests upon its walls
toward the rays of Ra, I came out upon the temple roof, and looked upon
the desert--upon sheeny sands, almost like slopes of satin shining
in the sun, upon paler sands in the distance, holding an Arab _campo
santo_, in which rose the little creamy cupolas of a sheikh’s tomb,
surrounded by a creamy wall, those little cupolas gave to me a feeling
of the real, the irresistible Africa such as I had not known since I had
been in Egypt; and I thought I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum
of praying and praising voices.
“God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens through which flow
rivulets. They shall be for ever therein, and that is the reward of the
virtuous.”
The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I approached the temple
deepened when I drew close to it, when I stood within it. In the first
hall, mighty, magnificent, full of enormous columns from which faces of
Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, I found only one
face almost complete, saved from the fury of fanatics by the protection
of the goddess of chance, in whom the modern Egyptian so implicitly
believes. In shape it was a delicate oval. In the long eyes, about the
brow, the cheeks, there was a strained expression that suggested to me
more than a gravity--almost an anguish--of spirit. As I looked at it, I
thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this the ideal of joy in the time of the
Ptolemies? Joy may be rapturous, or it may be serene; but could it ever
be like this? The pale, delicious blue that here and there, in tiny
sections, broke the almost haggard, greyish whiteness of this first hall
with the roof of black, like bits of an evening sky seen through tiny
window-slits in a sombre room, suggested joy, was joy summed up in
color. But Hathor’s face was weariful and sad.
From the gloom of the inner halls came a sound, loud, angry, menacing,
as I walked on, a sound of menace and an odor, heavy and deathlike.
Only in the first hall had those builders and decorators of two thousand
years ago been moved by their conception of the goddess to hail her,
to worship her, with the purity of white, with the sweet gaiety of
turquoise. Or so it seems to-day, when the passion of Christianity
against Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians come to seek
what Christian Copts destroyed; wander through the deserted courts,
desirous of looking upon the faces that have long since been hacked to
pieces. A more benign spirit informs our world, but, alas! Hathor has
been sacrificed to deviltries of old. And it is well, perhaps, that her
temple should be sad, like a place of silent waiting for the glories
that are gone.
With every step my melancholy grew. Encompassed by gloomy odors,
assailed by the clamour of gigantic bats, which flew furiously among the
monstrous pillars near a roof ominous as a storm-cloud, my spirit was
haunted by the sad eyes of Hathor, which gaze for ever from that column
in the first hall. Were they always like that? Once that face dwelt with
a crowd of worship. And all the other faces have gone, and all the glory
has passed. And, like so many of the living, the goddess has paid for
her splendors. The pendulum swung, and where men adored, men hated
her--her the goddess of love and loveliness. And as the human face
changes when terror and sorrow come, I felt as if Hathor’s face of stone
had changed upon its column, looking toward the Nile, in obedience to
the anguish in her heart; I felt as if Denderah were a majestic house
of grief. So I must always think of it, dark, tragic, and superb. The
Egyptians once believed that when death came to a man, the soul of him,
which they called the Ba, winged its way to the gods, but that, moved
by a sweet unselfishness, it returned sometimes to his tomb, to give
comfort to the poor, deserted mummy. Upon the lids of sarcophagi it is
sometimes represented as a bird, flying down to, or resting upon, the
mummy. As I went onward in the darkness, among the columns, over the
blocks of stone that form the pavements, seeing vaguely the sacred boats
upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the king before Osiris; as I mounted
and descended with the priests to roof and floor, I longed, instead of
the clamour of the bats, to hear the light flutter of the soft wings of
the Ba of Hathor, flying from Paradise to this sad temple of the desert
to bring her comfort in the gloom. I thought of her as a poor woman,
suffering as only women can in loneliness.
In the museum of Cairo there is the mummy of “the lady Amanit, priestess
of Hathor.” She lies there upon her back, with her thin body slightly
turned toward the left side, as if in an effort to change her position.
Her head is completely turned to the same side. Her mouth is wide open,
showing all the teeth. The tongue is lolling out. Upon the head the
thin, brown hair makes a line above the little ear, and is mingled at
the back of the head with false tresses. Round the neck is a mass of
ornaments, of amulets and beads. The right arm and hand lie along the
body. The expression of “the lady Amanit” is very strange, and very
subtle; for it combines horror--which implies activity--with a profound,
an impenetrable repose, far beyond the reach of all disturbance. In the
temple of Denderah I fancied the lady Amanit ministering sadly, even
terribly, to a lonely goddess, moving in fear through an eternal gloom,
dying at last there, overwhelmed by tasks too heavy for that tiny body,
the ultra-sensitive spirit that inhabited it. And now she sleeps--one
feels that, as one gazes at the mummy--very profoundly, though not yet
very calmly, the lady Amanit. But her goddess--still she wakes upon her
column.
When I came out at last into the sunlight of the growing day, I circled
the temple, skirting its gigantic, corniced walls, from which at
intervals the heads and paws of resting lions protrude, to see another
woman whose fame for loveliness and seduction is almost as legendary as
Aphrodite’s. It is fitting enough that Cleopatra’s form should be graven
upon the temple of Hathor; fitting, also, that though I found her in the
presence of deities, and in the company of her son, Caesarion, her face,
which is in profile, should have nothing of Hathor’s sad impressiveness.
This, no doubt, is not the real Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face
suggests a certain self-complacent cruelty and sensuality essentially
human, and utterly detached from all divinity, whereas in the face
of the goddess there is a something remote, and even distantly
intellectual, which calls the imagination to “the fields beyond.”
As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the boy clad in the rope of
plaited grass, and again he said, less shyly, “May your day be happy!”
It was a kindly wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a prophecy.
But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of Denderah, and I
remembered the legend of the lovely Lais, who, when she began to age,
covered herself from the eyes of men with a veil, and went every day at
evening to look upon her statue, in which the genius of Praxiteles had
rendered permanent the beauty the woman could not keep. One evening,
hanging to the statue’s pedestal by a garland of red roses, the sculptor
found a mirror, upon the polished disk of which were traced these words:
“Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: no longer able to see
there what she was, she will not see there what she has become.”
My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed dweller on the column in the first
hall, had she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Lais 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 worshipped, but I am worshipped no longer.”