“This, my lord, is the thinking-place of Rameses the Great.”
So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one morning--Ibrahim, who is almost as
prolific in the abrupt creation of peers as if he were a democratic
government.
I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with columns, architraves
covered with inscriptions, segments of flat roof. Here and there traces
of painting, dull-red, pale, ethereal blue--the “love-color” of Egypt,
as the Egyptians often call it--still adhered to the stone. This hall,
dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air.
From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy
mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still
as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and
of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the
sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly his singing died away.
And I thought of the “Lay of the Harper” which is inscribed upon the
tombs of Thebes--those tombs under those gleaming mountains:
“For no one carries away his goods with him;
Yea, no one returns again who has gone thither.”
It took the place of the song that had died as I thought of the great
king’s glory; that he had been here, and had long since passed away.
“The thinking-place of Rameses the Great!”
“Suttinly.”
“You must leave me alone here, Ibrahim.”
I watched his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun
through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in
the “thinking-place” of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky
dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy,
vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but
delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down
on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me--the silence of
the Ramesseum.
Was _Horbehutet_, the winged disk, with crowned _uroei_, ever set up
above this temple’s principal door to keep it from destruction? I do not
know. But, if he was, he failed perfectly to fulfil his mission. And I
am glad he failed. I am glad of the ruin that is here, glad that walls
have crumbled or been overthrown, that columns have been cast down, and
ceilings torn off from the pillars that supported them, letting in the
sky. I would have nothing different in the thinking-place of Rameses.
Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impending that will not,
cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he loomed over the Egypt that is
dead, he looms over the Egypt of to-day. Everywhere you meet his traces,
everywhere you hear his name. You say to a tall young Egyptian: “How big
you are growing, Hassan!”
He answers, “Come back next year, my gentleman, and I shall be like
Rameses the Great.”
Or you ask of the boatman who rows you, “How can you pull all day
against the current of the Nile?” And he smiles, and lifting his brown
arm, he says to you: “Look! I am strong as Rameses the great.”
This familiar fame comes down through some twenty years. Carved upon
limestone and granite, now it seems engraven also on every Egyptian
heart that beats not only with the movement of shadoof, or is not buried
in the black soil fertilized by Hapi. Thus can inordinate vanity prolong
the true triumph of genius, and impress its own view of itself upon
the minds of millions. This Rameses is believed to be the Pharaoh who
oppressed the children of Israel.
As I sat in the Ramesseum that morning, I recalled his face--the face
of an artist and a dreamer rather than that of a warrior and oppressor;
Asiatic, handsome, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, aristocratic,
and refined. I could imagine it bending above the little serpents of the
sistrum as they lifted their melodious voices to bid Typhon depart, or
watching the dancing women’s rhythmic movements, or smiling half kindly,
half with irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who made her plaint:
“What is sweet to the mouth, to me is as the gall of birds;
Thy breath alone can comfort my heart.”
And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the
columns with their opening lotus flowers. For it is the hall of lotus
columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking-place of the king.
There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns
of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near the
sun. Near the sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to those
who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle halls, the
columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky. And flowers of
stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged! That does not matter.
There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the thought that
directed the hands which shaped them and placed them where they are.
In Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient Egyptians loved
the _Nymphaea lotus_, which is the white lotus, and the _Nymphaea
coeruloea_, the lotus that is blue. Did they not place Horus in its cup,
and upon the head of Nefer-Tum, the nature god, who represented in
their mythology the heat of the rising sun, and who seems to have been
credited with power to grant life in the world to come, set it as a
sort of regal ornament? To Seti I., when he returned in glory from his
triumphs over the Syrians, were given bouquets of lotus-blossoms by
the great officers of his household. The tiny column of green feldspar
ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, even as the carnelian buckle
typified the blood of Isis, which washed away all sin. Kohl pots were
fashioned in the form of the lotus, cartouches sprang from it, wine
flowed from cups shaped like it. The lotus was part of the very life of
Egypt, as the rose, the American Beauty rose, is part of our social
life of to-day. And here, in the Ramesseum, I found campaniform, or
lotus-flower capitals on the columns--here where Rameses once perhaps
dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that famous combat when, “like
Baal in his fury,” he fought single-handed against the host of the
Hittites massed in two thousand, five hundred chariots to overthrow him.
The Ramesseum is a temple not of winds, but of soft and kindly airs.
There comes Zephyrus, whispering love to Flora incarnate in the Lotus.
To every sunbeam, to every little breeze, the ruins stretch out arms.
They adore the deep-blue sky, the shining, sifted sand, untrammeled
nature, all that whispers, “Freedom.”
So I felt that day when Ibrahim left me, so I feel always when I sit
in the Ramesseum, that exultant victim of Time’s here not sacrilegious
hand.
All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a sacred necessity
of life. Liberty seems to drench the Ramesseum. And all strong souls
must exult there. The sun has taken it as a beloved possession. No massy
walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battlements rear themselves up
against the outer world as at Medinet-Abu. No huge pylons cast down upon
the ground their forms in darkness. The stone glows with the sun, seems
almost to have a soul glowing with the sense, the sun-ray sense, of
freedom. The heart leaps up in the Ramesseum, not frivolously, but with
a strange, sudden knowledge of the depths of passionate joy there are
in life and in bountiful, glorious nature. Instead of the strength of
a prison one feels the ecstasy of space; instead of the safety of
inclosure, the rapture of naked publicity. But the public to whom this
place of the great king is consigned is a public of Theban hills; of
the sunbeams striking from them over the wide world toward the east;
of light airs, of drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of
butterflies with pure white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab
horse, mounted in the heart of an oasis, to the verge of the great
desert, you will remember the bound, thrilling with fiery animation,
which he gives when he sets his feet on the sand beyond the last
tall date-palms. A bound like that the soul gives when you sit in
the Ramesseum, and see the crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of
palm-trees, and the drowsy mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond
the Nile. And you look up, perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a
lotus column near you, relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man
singing.
A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god of this place, whoever
he be, whether only some humble, happy slave, or the “superintendent of
song and of the recreation of the king.” Rather even than Amun-Ra
let him be the god. For there is something nobly joyous in this
architecture, a dignity that sings.
It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was buried
in the Ramesseum, and when first I entered it the “Lay of the Harper”
came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing away of
glory into the shades of death. But an optimism almost as determined
as Emerson’s was quickly bred in me there. I could not be sad, though
I could be happily thoughtful, in the light of the Ramesseum. And even
when I left the thinking-place, and, coming down the central aisle, saw
in the immersing sunshine of the Osiride Court the fallen colossus of
the king, I was not struck to sadness.
Imagine the greatest figure in the world--such a figure as this Rameses
was in his day--with all might, all glory, all climbing power, all
vigor, tenacity of purpose, and granite strength of will concentrated
within it, struck suddenly down, and falling backward in a collapse of
which the thunder might shake the vitals of the earth, and you have this
prostrate colossus. Even now one seems to hear it fall, to feel the warm
soil trembling beneath one’s feet as one approaches it. A row of statues
of enormous size, with arms crossed as if in resignation, glowing in the
sun, in color not gold or amber, but a delicate, desert yellow, watch
near it like servants of the dead. On a slightly lower level than there
it lies, and a little nearer the Nile. Only the upper half of the figure
is left, but its size is really terrific. This colossus was fifty-seven
feet high. It weighed eight hundred tons. Eight hundred tons of syenite
went to its making, and across the shoulders its breadth is, or was,
over twenty-two feet. But one does not think of measurements as one
looks upon it. It is stupendous. That is obvious and that is enough. Nor
does one think of its finish, of its beautiful, rich color, of any of
its details. One thinks of it as a tremendous personage laid low, as
the mightiest of the mighty fallen. One thinks of it as the dead Rameses
whose glory still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud that will not
disperse. One thinks of it as the soul that commanded, and lo! there
rose up above the sands, at the foot of the hills of Thebes, the
exultant Ramesseum.