XVKOM OMBOS

THE TEMPLE OF EDFU FROM THE TOP OF THE PYLON

me, when the darkness gave up its secrets; when I saw not clearly, but dimly, the long way between the columns, the noble columns themselves, the gradual, slight upward slope,—graduated by genius; there is no other word,—which led to the sanctuary, seen at last as a little darkness, in which all the mystery of worship, and of the silent desires of men, was surely concentrated, and kept by the stone forever. Even the succession of the darknesses, like shadows growing deeper and deeper, seemed planned by some great artist in the management of light, and so of shadow effects. The perfection of form is in Edfu, impossible to describe, impossible not to feel. The tremendous effect it has—an effect upon the soul—is created by a combination of shapes, of proportions, of different levels, of different heights, by consummate graduation. And these shapes, proportions, different levels, and heights, are seen in dimness. Not that jeweled dimness one loves in Gothic cathedrals, but the heavy dimness of windowless, mighty chambers lighted only by a rebuked daylight ever trying to steal in. One is captured by no ornament, seduced by no lovely colors. Better than any ornament, greater than any radiant glory of color, is this massive austerity. It is like the ultimate in an art. Everything has been tried, every strangeness,bizarrerie, absurdity, every wild scheme of hues, every preposterous subject—to take an extreme instance, a camel, wearing a top-hat, and lighted up by fireworks,which I saw recently in a picture-gallery of Munich. And at the end a genius paints a portrait of a wrinkled old woman’s face, and the world regards and worships. Or all discords have been flung together pell-mell, resolution of them has been deferred perpetually, perhaps even denied altogether, chord of B major has been struck with C major, works have closed upon the leading note or the dominant seventh, symphonies have been composed to be played in the dark, or to be accompanied by a magic-lantern’s efforts, operas been produced which are merely carnage and a row,—and at the end a genius writes a little song, and the world gives the tribute of its breathless silence and its tears. And it knows that though other things may be done, better things can never be done. For no perfection can exceed any other perfection.

And so in Edfu I feel that this untinted austerity is perfect; that whatever may be done in architecture during future ages of the world, Edfu, while it lasts, will remain a thing supreme—supreme in form and, because of this supremacy, supreme in the spell which it casts upon the soul.

The sanctuary is just a small, beautifully proportioned, inmost chamber, with a black roof, containing a sort of altar of granite, and a great polished granite shrine which no doubt once contained the god Horus. I am glad he is not there now. How far more impressive it is to stand in an empty sanctuary, in the

THE COURT, TEMPLE OF EDFU

house divine of “the Hidden One,” whom the nations of the earth worship, whether they spread their robes on the sand and turn their faces to Mecca, or beat the tambourine and sing “glory-hymns” of salvation, or flagellate themselves in the night before the patron saint of the Passionists, or only gaze at the snow-white plume that floats from the snows of Etna under the rose of dawn, and feel the soul behind Nature. Among the temples of Egypt, Edfu is the house divine of “the Hidden One,” the perfect temple of worship.

SOME people talk of the “sameness” of the Nile; and there is a lovely sameness of golden light, of delicious air, of people, and of scenery. For Egypt is, after all, mainly a great river with strips on each side of cultivated land, flat, green, not very varied. River, green plains, yellow plains, pink, brown, steel-gray, or pale-yellow mountains, wail of shadoof, wail of sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort of golden monotony, in this land pervaded with light and pervaded with sound. Always there is light around you, and you are bathing in it, and nearly always, if you are living, as I was, on the water, there is a multitude of mingling sounds floating, floating to your ears. As there are two lines of green land, two lines of mountains, following the course of the Nile; so are there two lines of voices that cease their calling and their singing only as you draw near to Nubia. For then, with the green land, they fade away, these miles upon miles of calling and singing brown men; and amber and ruddy sands creep downward to the Nile. And the air seems subtly changing, and the light perhaps

From a photograph by James S LeeHYPOSTYLE HALL, KÔM OMBOS

From a photograph by James S Lee

HYPOSTYLE HALL, KÔM OMBOS

growing a little harder. And you are aware of other regions unlike those you are leaving, more African, more savage, less suave, less like a dreaming. And especially the silence makes a great impression on you. But before you enter this silence, between the amber and ruddy walls that will lead you on to Nubia, and to the land of the crocodile, you have a visit to pay. For here, high up on a terrace, looking over a great bend of the river, is Kom Ombos. And Kom Ombos is the temple of the crocodile god.

Sebek was one of the oldest and one of the most evil of the Egyptian gods. In the Fayum he was worshiped, as well as at Kom Ombos, and there, in the holy lake of his temple, were numbers of holy crocodiles, which Strabo tells us were decorated with jewels like pretty women. He did not get on with the other gods, and was sometimes confused with Set, who personified natural darkness, and who also was worshiped by the people about Kom Ombos.

I have spoken of the golden sameness of the Nile, but this sameness is broken by the variety of the temples. Here you have a striking instance of this variety. Edfu, only forty miles from Kom Ombos, the next temple which you visit, is the most perfect temple in Egypt. Kom Ombos one of the most imperfect. Edfu is a divine house of “the Hidden One,” full of a sacred atmosphere. Kom Ombos is the house of crocodiles. In ancient days the inhabitants of Edfuabhorred, above everything, crocodiles and their worshipers. And here at Kom Ombos the crocodile was adored. You are in a different atmosphere.

As soon as you land, you are greeted with crocodiles, though fortunately not by them. A heap of their black mummies is shown to you reposing in a sort of tomb or shrine open at one end to the air. By these mummies the new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have carried you in an instant from that which is pervadingly general to that which is narrowly particular; from the purely noble, which seems to belong to all time, to the entirely barbaric, which belongs only to times outworn. It is difficult to feel as if one had anything in common with men who seriously worshiped crocodiles, had priests to feed them, and decorated their scaly necks with jewels.

Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Kom Ombos, a temple which dates from the times of the Ptolemies, though there was a temple in earlier days which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. It stands high above the Nile, and close to the river, on a terrace which has recently been constructed to save it from the encroachments of the water. And it looks down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear light of early morning. On the right, and far off, is a delicious pink bareness of distant flats and hills. Opposite there is a flood of verdure and of trees going to mountains, a spit of sand where is an inlet of the river,

THE TEMPLE OF KÔM OMBOS

with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for a wind. On the left is the big bend of the Nile, singularly beautiful, almost voluptuous in form, and girdled with a radiant green of crops, with palm-trees, and again the distant hills. Sebek was well advised to have his temples here and in the glorious Fayum, that land flowing with milk and honey, where the air is full of the voices of the flocks and herds, and alive with the wild pigeons; where the sweet sugar-cane towers up in fairy forests, the beloved home of the jackal; where the green corn waves to the horizon, and the runlets of water make a maze of silver threads carrying life and its happy murmur through all the vast oasis.

At the guardian’s gate by which you go in there sits not a watch dog, nor yet a crocodile, but a watch cat, small, but very determined, and very attentive to its duties, and neatly carved in stone. You try to look like a crocodile-worshiper. It is deceived, and lets you pass. And you are alone with the growing morning and Kom Ombos.

I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere, in Kom Ombos. I examined it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. Its grandeur is great, but it did not affect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its nobility cannot be questioned, but I did not stilly rejoice in it, as in the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the Ramesseum.

The oldest thing at Kom Ombos is a gateway ofsandstone placed there by Thothmes III as a tribute to Sebek. The great temple is of a warm-brown color, a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that soothes and almost comforts the eyes that have been for many days boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the terrace platform above the river you face a low and ruined wall, on which there are some lively reliefs, beyond which is a large, open court containing a quantity of stunted, once big columns standing on big bases. Immediately before you the temple towers up, very gigantic, very majestic, with a stone pavement, walls on which still remain some traces of paintings, and really grand columns, enormous in size and in good formation. There are fine architraves, and some bits of roofing, but the greater part is open to the air. Through a doorway is a second hall containing columns much less noble, and beyond this one walks in ruin, among crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken statues, become mere slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the end is a wall, with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that look like monkish cells, closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there are two sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru-ur, or Haroëris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called “the Elder,” which was worshiped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark bearing an image of the deity.

TEMPLE OF KOM OMBOS. SCREEN WALL OF HYPOSTYLE HALL

There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins, showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur with the head of a hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has no fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity, and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts a number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus flowers. I remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the end of the great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan desert stretch to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked curiously desolate and even sinister under a low, gray sky. Beyond the wiry tamarisk bushes, which grow far out from the shore, thousands upon thousands of wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could see. We took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked fishermen, and were rowed with big, broadbladed oars out upon the silent flood that the silent desert surrounded. But the duck were too wary ever to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently near, they rose in black throngs, and skimmed low into the distance of the wintry landscape, trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on the wall of Kom Ombos. There was no duck for dinner in camp that night, and the cook was inconsolable. But I hadseen a relief come to life, and surmounted my disappointment.

Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers and haters of crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and the haters of their worship, I shall always think of them together, because I drifted on theLouliafrom one to the other, and saw no interesting temple between them, and because their personalities are as opposed as were, centuries ago, the tenets of those who adored within them. The Egyptians of old were devoted to the hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the reaches of the Nile between Assuan and Luxor, and also much lower down. But I believe that no reliefs, or paintings, of this sport are to be found upon the walls of the temples and the tombs. The fear of Sebek, perhaps, prevailed even over the dwellers about the temple of Edfu. Yet how could fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of those who were privileged to worship in such a temple, or even reverently to stand under the colonnade within the court? As well, perhaps, one might ask how men could be inspired to raise such a perfect building to a deity with the face of a hawk? But Horus was not the god of crocodiles, but a god of the sun. And his power to inspire men must have been vast; for the greatest conception in stone in Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole world, the Sphinx, as De Rougé proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a representation of Horus transformed to

THE ISLAND OF ELEPHANTINE, FROM ASSOUAN

conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu! For such marvels we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And if we forget the hawk, which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples, and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god of the sun, driving “westerly all day in his flaming chariot,” and shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu to-day is surely a worshiper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as the world lasts there will be sun-worshipers. Every brown man upon the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and comes at last into the somber wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the deck of theLoulia.

And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.

AS I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of “the great Enchantress,” or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, “the Lady of Philæ,” the land began to change in character, to be full of a new and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to northern Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are wilder-looking, and much wilder-seeming, than Egypt. Now, as I approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Näil, crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the traveling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love creeping down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them that wonderful air which belongs only to them—the air that dwells among the dunes in the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of Liberty upon the face of a

THE ISLE OF PHILÆ BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DAM

man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as lithe, tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets flames in the eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind to the Sloughi. The true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, as I saw to right and left amber curves and sheeny recesses, shining ridges and bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds make upon them? It is an enchantedroyaumeof the sands through which one approaches Isis.

Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Philæ, and they have given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute,—it cost about a million and a half pounds,—and no doubt she ought to be gratified.

Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philæ, as she mourns with her sister, Nepthys, at the heads of somany mummies of Osirians upon the walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about her, and make their plaint with hers—their plaint for the peace that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the “Holy Island.”

I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philæ. I had sweet memories of the island that had been with me for many years—memories of still mornings under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands; memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from the lifted hands of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island and the river; memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of the great spaces, under the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I could not believe the asseverations of certain practical persons, full of the hard and almost angry desire of “Progress,” that no harm had been done by the creation of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary, it had benefited the temple.

THE SACRED ISLE OF PHILÆ

The action of the water upon the stone, they said with vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and consolidate it. Here I should like to lie, but I resist the temptation. Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly the English engineers have helped to prolong the lives of the buildings of Philæ, and Monsieur Maspero has declared that “the state of the temple of Philæ becomes continually more satisfactory.” So be it! Longevity has been, by a happy chance, secured. But what of beauty? What of the beauty of the past, and what of the schemes for the future? Is Philæ even to be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised still higher, until Philæ ceases to be? Soon, no doubt, an answer will be given.

Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic sterility, I found a something diseased. Philæ now, when out of the water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a thing stricken with some creeping malady—one of those maladies which begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.

I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal—Shellal with its railway-station, its workmen’s buildings, its tents, its dozens of screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun, itsbustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen, Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the desert lay all around—the great sands, the great masses of granite that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into obelisks, and sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the bend of the river, dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive beehive of human bees, sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature and human nature, rose the fabled “Pharaoh’s Bed”; gracious, tender, from Shellal most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold against the grim background of the hills on the western shore. It seemed to plead for mercy, like something feminine threatened with outrage, to protest through its mere beauty, as a woman might protest by an attitude, against further desecration.

And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam, making answer to the protest.

What irony was in this scene! In the old days of Egypt Philæ was sacred ground, was the Nile-protected home of sacerdotal mysteries, was a veritable Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was forbidden even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians swore solemnly “By him who sleeps in Philæ.” Now they sometimes swear angrily at him who wakes in, or at least by, Philæ, and keeps them steadily going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being forbidden to draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from

From a photograph by James S. LeeTHE TEMPLE OF ISIS, PHILÆ

From a photograph by James S. Lee

THE TEMPLE OF ISIS, PHILÆ

foreign countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty, but to earn a living wage.

And “Pharaoh’s Bed” looks out over the water and seems to wonder what will be the end.

I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far off a gray smudge—the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of rubbish, some of them gray, some of them in color so dark that they resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the “black country” in England through which one rushes on one’s way to the North. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over grit stone and granite.

The setting of Philæ is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron look. On a gray or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Philæ the more because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious tenderness of charm—a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with its buildings. But now,and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored—if possible.

The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned toward “Pharaoh’s Bed,” toward the temple standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.

I went first to “Pharaoh’s Bed.”

Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles’s statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf complexion—one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow,

NEARLY SUBMERGED COLUMNS, ISLE OF PHILÆ

of purity, with the flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the color of her face—from the throat upward to just beneath the nose—from the warm white to a mottled, grayish hue. Imagine the line that would seem to be traced between the two complexions—the mottled gray below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have “Pharaoh’s Bed” and the temple of Philæ as they are to-day.

“PHARAOH’s Bed,” which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can “carry off,” as it were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity. To put it in very practical language, “Pharaoh’s Bed” was “all of a piece.” The form was married to the color. The color seemed to melt into the form. It was indeed a bed in which the soul that worships beauty could rest happily entranced. Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say that apparently this building was left unfinished. That may be so. But for all that it was one of the most finished things in Egypt, essentially a thing to inspire within one the “perfect calm that is Greek.” The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the beautiful pale yellow of the stone of

PHARAOH’S BED, BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DAM

the lower part of the building to a hideous and dreary gray,—which made me think of a steel knife on which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run,—has destroyed the uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and color. And so it is with the temple. It is as it were cut in two by the intrusion into it of this hideous, mottled complexion left by the receded water. Everywhere one sees disease on walls and columns, almost blotting out bas-reliefs, giving to their active figures a morbid, a sickly look. The effect is specially distressing in the open court that precedes the temple dedicated to the Lady of Philæ. In this court, which is at the southern end of the island, the Nile at certain seasons is now forced to rise very nearly as high as the capitals of many of the columns. The consequence of this is that here the disease seems making rapid strides. One feels it is drawing near to the heart, and that the poor, doomed invalid may collapse at any moment.

Yes, there is much to make one sad at Philæ. But how much of pure beauty there is left—of beauty that mutely protests against any further outrage!

As there is something epic in the grandeur of the Lotus Hall at Karnak, so there is something lyrical in the soft charm of the Philæ temple. Certain things or places, certain things in certain places, always suggest to my mind certain people in whose genius I take delight—who have won me, and moved me by their art. Whenever I go to Philæ, the name of Shelley comes tome. I scarcely could tell why. I have no special reason to connect Shelley with Philæ. But when I see that almost airy loveliness of stone, so simply elegant, so, somehow, spring-like in its pale-colored beauty, its happy, daffodil charm, with its touch of the Greek,—the sensitive hand from Attica stretched out over Nubia,—I always think of Shelley. I think of Shelley the youth who dived down into the pool so deep that it seemed he was lost forever to the sun. I think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric ecstasy, who was himself like an embodied

Longing for something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow.

Lyrical Philæ is like a temple of dreams, and of all poets Shelley might have dreamed the dream, and have told it to the world in a song.

For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Philæ; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sentimental.) Edward Fitzgerald once defined taste as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Philæ, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of Isis?

I have heard a clever critic and antiquarian declare that he is not very fond of Philæ; that he feels a

“PHARAOH’S BED,” ISLAND OF PHILÆ

certain “spuriousness” in the temple due to the mingling of Greek with Egyptian influences. He may be right. I am no antiquarian, and, as a mere lover of beauty, I do not feel this “spuriousness.” I can see neither two quarreling strengths nor any weakness caused by division. I suppose I see only the beauty, as I might see only the beauty of a woman bred of a handsome father and mother of different races, and who, not typical of either, combined in her features and figure distinguishing merits of both. It is true that there is a particular pleasure which is roused in us only by the absolutely typical—the completely thoroughbred person or thing. It may be a pleasure not caused by beauty, and it may be very keen, nevertheless. When it is combined with the joy roused in us by all beauty, it is a very pure emotion of exceptional delight. Philæ does not, perhaps, give this emotion. But it certainly has a lovableness that attaches the heart in a quite singular degree. The Philæ-lover is the most faithful of lovers. The hold of his mistress upon him, once it has been felt, is never relaxed. And in his affection for Philæ there is, I think, nearly always a rainbow strain of romance.

When we love anything, we love to be able to say of the object of our devotion, “There is nothing like it.” Now, in all Egypt, and I suppose in all the world, there is nothing just like Philæ. There are temples, yes; but where else is there a bouquet of graciousbuildings such as these gathered in such a holder as this tiny, raft-like isle? And where else are just such delicate and, as I have said, light and almost feminine elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe sterility? Once, beyond Philæ, the Great Cataract roared down from the wastes of Nubia into the green fertility of Upper Egypt. It roars no longer. But still the masses of the rocks, and still the amber and the yellow sands, and still the iron-colored hills, keep guard round Philæ. And still, despite the vulgar desecration that has turned Shellal into a workmen’s suburb and dowered it with a railway-station, there is mystery in Philæ, and the sense of isolation that only an island gives. Even now one can forget in Philæ—forget, after a while, and in certain parts of its buildings, the presence of the gray disease; forget the threatening of the altruists, who desire to benefit humanity by clearing as much beauty out of humanity’s abiding-place as possible; forget the fact of the railway, except when the shriek of the engine floats over the water to one’s ears; forget economic problems, and the destruction that their solving brings upon the silent world of things whose “use,” denied, unrecognized, or laughed at, to man is in their holy beauty, whose mission lies not upon the broad highways where tramps the hungry body, but upon the secret, shadowy byways where glides the hungry soul.

Yes, one can forget even now in the hall of the

From a photograph by James S. LeeIN “PHARAOH’S BED,” ISLAND OF PHILÆ

From a photograph by James S. Lee

IN “PHARAOH’S BED,” ISLAND OF PHILÆ

temple of Isis, where the capricious graces of form are linked with the capricious graces of color, where, like old and delicious music in the golden strings of a harp, dwells a something—what is it? A murmur, or a perfume, or a breathing?—of old and vanished years when forsakened gods were worshiped. And one can forget in the chapel of Hathor, on whose wall little Horus is born, and in the gray hounds’ chapel beside it. One can forget, for one walks in beauty.

Lovely are the doorways in Philæ; enticing are the shallow steps that lead one onward and upward; gracious the yellow towers that seem to smile a quiet welcome. And there is one chamber that is simply a place of magic—the hall of the painted portico, the delicious hall of the flowers.

It is this chamber which always makes me think of Philæ as a lovely temple of dreams, this silent, retired chamber, where some fabled princess might well have been touched to a long, long sleep of enchantment, and lain for years upon years among the magical flowers—the lotus, and the palm, and the papyrus.

In my youth it made upon me an indelible impression. Through intervening years, filled with many new impressions, many wanderings, many visions of beauty in other lands, that retired, painted chamber had not faded from my mind—or shall I say from my heart? There had seemed to me within it something that was ineffable, as in a lyric of Shelley’s there is somethingthat is ineffable, or in certain pictures of Boecklin, such as “The Villa by the Sea.” And when at last, almost afraid and hesitating, I came into it once more, I found in it again the strange spell of old enchantment.

It seems as if this chamber had been imagined by a poet, who had set it in the center of the temple of his dream. It is such a spontaneous chamber that one can scarcely imagine it more than a day and a night in the building. Yet in detail it is lovely; it is finished and strangely mighty; it is a lyric in stone, the most poetical chamber, perhaps, in the whole of Egypt. For Philæ I count in Egypt, though really it is in Nubia.

One who has not seen Philæ may perhaps wonder how a tall chamber of solid stone, containing heavy and soaring columns, can be like a lyric of Shelley’s, can be exquisitely spontaneous, and yet hold a something of mystery that makes one tread softly in it, and fear to disturb within it some lovely sleeper of Nubia, some Princess of the Nile. He must continue to wonder. To describe this chamber calmly, as I might, for instance, describe the temple of Derr, would be simply to destroy it. For things ineffable cannot be fully explained, or not be fully felt by those the twilight of whose dreams is fitted to mingle with their twilight. They who are meant to love with ardorse passionnent pour la passion. And they who are meant to take and to keep the spirit of a dream, whether it be hidden in a poem, or held in the cup of a flower, or enfolded in

From a photograph by James S. LeeFORE-COURT OF THE TEMPLE OF ISIS AND “PHARAOH’S BED.” PHILÆ

From a photograph by James S. Lee

FORE-COURT OF THE TEMPLE OF ISIS AND “PHARAOH’S BED.” PHILÆ

arms of stone, will surely never miss it, even though they can hear roaring loudly above its elfin voice the cry of directed waters rushing down to Upper Egypt.

How can one disentangle from their tapestry web the different threads of a spell? And even if one could, if one could hold them up, and explain, “The cause of the spell is that this comes in contact with this, and that this, which I show you, blends with, fades into, this,” how could it advantage any one? Nothing would be made clearer, nothing be really explained. The ineffable is, and must ever remain, something remote and mysterious.

And so one may say many things of this painted chamber of Philæ, and yet never convey, perhaps never really know, the innermost cause of its charm. In it there is obvious beauty of form, and a seizing beauty of color, beauty of sunlight and shadow, of antique association. This turquoise blue is enchanting, and Isis was worshiped here. What has the one to do with the other? Nothing; and yet how much! For is not each of these facts a thread in the tapestry web of the spell? The eyes see the rapture of this very perfect blue. The imagination hears, as if very far off, the solemn chanting of priests, and smells the smoke of strange perfumes, and sees the long, aquiline nose and the thin, haughty lips of the goddess. And the color becomes strange to the eyes, as well as very lovely, because, perhaps, it was there—it almost certainly wasthere—when from Constantinople went forth the decree that all Egypt should be Christian; when the priests of the sacred brotherhood of Isis were driven from their temple.

Isis nursing Horus gave way to the Virgin and the child. But the cycles spin away down “the ringing grooves of change.” From Egypt has passed away that decreed Christianity. Now from the minaret the muezzin cries, and in palm-shaded villages I hear the loud hymns of earnest pilgrims starting on the journey to Mecca. And ever this painted chamber shelters its mystery of poetry, its mystery of charm. And still its marvelous colors are fresh as in the far-off pagan days, and the opening lotus-flowers, and the closed lotus-buds, and the palm and the papyrus, are on the perfect columns. And their intrinsic loveliness, and their freshness, and their age, and the mysteries they have looked on—all these facts are part of the spell that governs us to-day. In Edfu one is inclosed in a wonderful austerity. And one can only worship. In Philæ one is wrapped in a radiance of color. And one can only dream. For there is coral pink, and there a wonderful green, “like the green light that lingers in the west,” and there is a blue as deep as the blue of a tropical sea; and there are green-blue and lustrous, ardent red. And the odd fantasy in the coloring, is not that like the fantasy in the temple of a dream? For those who painted these capitals for the greater glory

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