KARNAK

Buildings have personalities. Some fascinate as beautiful women

fascinate; some charm as a child may charm, naively, 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 traveller, 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

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 Philae 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 dreams 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 for

ever 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 listen 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 little boatmen of the lower

reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins of the desert, and the donkey

boys of the villages, from the sheikh 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.

“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 standard

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, grey 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 underworld; 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 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. Only a bar of dull

red, holding a hint of brown, by 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

envelope, 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 hypo-style halls. As I

looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made more

touching than in day-time, 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 there 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 exorcised the demon from the suffering

Princess, so now I exorcise 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 intellectual, but only to the

emotions and the soul.”

And presently I went down, and yielding a complete and happy obedience

to Khuns, I wandered along 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, suggest

the working of some evil spell, perpetual watchfulness, combined with

eternal inactivity, the unslumbering mind caged in the body that is

paralysed.

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 for ever 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 triumphs. 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; among temples I say, for the Sphinx is

of all the marvels of Egypt by far the most marvellous. 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.