“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.
WasHorbehutet, the winged disk, with crowneduroei, 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 theNymphaea lotus, which is the white lotus, and theNymphaea 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.
Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter, and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a woman in 1500 B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing—ever so knowingly—against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise them.
Hatshepsu with a beard! Never will I believe it. Or if she ever seemed to wear one, I will swear it was only the tattooed ornament with which all the lovely women of the Fayum decorate their chins to-day, throwing into relief the smiling, soft lips, the delicate noses, the liquid eyes, and leading one from it step by step to the beauties it precedes.
Mr. Wallis Budge says in his book on the antiquities of Egypt: “It would be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepsu, if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari.” By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here—a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness—refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain—which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It was not the solemn Senmut (he wore a beard, I’m sure) who chose that background, if I know anything of women.
Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar. My eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath the mountains. I had asked: “What do those little pillars mean? And are those little doors?” I had promised myself to go there, as one promises oneself abonne boucheto finish a happy banquet. And I had realized the subtlety, essentially feminine, that had placed a temple there. And Menu-Hotep’s temple, perhaps you say, was it not there before the queen’s? Then he must have possessed a subtlety purely feminine, or have been advised by one of his wives in his building operations, or by some favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man would probably think that the best way to attract and to fix attention on any object was to make it much bigger than things near and around it, to set up a giant among dwarfs.
Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her generation, she set her long but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is the result? Simply that whenever one looks toward them one says, “What are those little pillars?” Or if one is more instructed, one thinks about Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices are as nothing. A woman’s wile has blotted them out.
And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored precipices. And they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, bred in a land that is the prey of the sun. Every shade of orange and yellow glows and grows pale on their bosses, in their clefts. They shoot out turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They show great teeth, like the tiger when any one draws near. And, like the tiger, they seem perpetually informed by a spirit that is angry. Blake wrote of the tiger:
“Tiger, tiger, burning brightIn the forests of the night.”
These tiger-precipices of Libya are burning things, avid like beasts of prey. But the restored apricot-colored pillars are not afraid of their impending fury—fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little woman, almost it seems to me; and still less afraid are the white pillars, and the brilliant paintings that decorate the walls within.
As many people in the sad but lovely islands off the coast of Scotland believe in “doubles,” as the old classic writers believed in man’s “genius,” so the ancient Egyptian believed in his “Ka,” or separate entity, a sort of spiritual other self, to be propitiated and ministered to, presented with gifts, and served with energy and ardor. On this temple of Deir-el-Bahari is the scene of the birth of Hatshepsu, and there are two babies, the princess and her Ka. For this imagined Ka, when a great queen, long after, she built this temple, or chapel, that offerings might be made there on certain appointed days. Fortunate Ka of Hatshepsu to have had so cheerful a dwelling! Liveliness pervades Deir-el-Bahari. I remember, when I was on my first visit to Egypt, lunching at Thebes with Monsieur Naville and Mr. Hogarth, and afterward going with them to watch the digging away of the masses of sand and rubbish which concealed this gracious building. I remember the songs of the half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun, and I remember seeing a white temple wall come up into the light with all the painted figures surely dancing with joy upon it. And they are surely dancing still.
Here you may see, brilliant as yesterday’s picture anywhere, fascinatingly decorative trees growing bravely in little pots, red people offering incense which is piled up on mounds like mountains, Ptah-Seket, Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen in the company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal of the cows. The cows are being weighed in scales. There are three of them. One is a philosopher, and reposes with an air that says, “Even this last indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring spirit.” But the other two sitting up, look as apprehensive as old ladies in a rocking express, expectant of an accident. The vividness of the colors in this temple is quite wonderful. And much of its great attraction comes rather from its position, and from them, than essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, what the long shell contains—its happy murmur of life—is more fascinating than the shell. There, instead of being uplifted or overawed by form, we are rejoiced by color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the story that color and movement tell. And over all there is the bright, blue, painted sky, studded, almost distractedly studded, with a plethora of the yellow stars the Egyptians made like starfish.
The restored apricot-colored columns outside look unhappily suburban when you are near them. The white columns with their architraves are more pleasant to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched chapels, the small white steps leading upward to shallow sanctuaries, the small black foxes facing each other on little yellow pedestals—attract one like the details and amusing ornaments of a clever woman’s boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one roves in a gaily attentive mood, feeling all the time Hatshepsu’s fascination.
You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the wall, with a face decidedly sensual—a long, straight nose, thick lips, an expression rather determined than agreeable. Her mother looks as Semitic as a Jew moneylender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Thothmes II., has a weak and poor-spirited countenance—decidedly an accomplished performer on the second violin. The mother wears on her head a snake, no doubt a cobra-di-capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Thothmes is clad in a loin-cloth. And a god, with a sleepy expression and a very fish-like head, appears in this group of personages to offer the key of life. Another painting of the queen shows her on her knees drinking milk from the sacred cow, with an intent and greedy figure, and an extraordinarily sensual and expressive face. That she was well guarded is surely proved by a brave display of her soldiers—red men on a white wall. Full of life and gaiety all in a row they come, holding weapons, and, apparently, branches, and advancing with a gait of triumph that tells of “spacious days.” And at their head is an officer, who looks back, much like a modern drill sergeant, to see how his men are marching.
In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock as is the northern shrine, once more I found traces of the “Lady of the Under-World.” For this shrine was dedicated to Hathor, though the whole temple was sacred to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column were the remains of the goddess’s face, with a broad brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic had hacked away the mouth.
The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famousVacheof Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur Naville as lately as 1905. It stands in the museum at Cairo, but for ever it will be connected in the minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and the Colonnades of Thebes. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentu-Hotep III., in a chapel of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor was found.
It is not easy to convey by any description the impression this marvellous statue makes. Many of us love our dogs, our horses, some of us adore our cats; but which of us can think, without a smile, of worshipping a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite’s sacred animal. Under the form of a cow she was often represented. And in the statue she is presented to us as a limestone cow. And positively this cow is to be worshipped.
She is shown in the act apparently of stepping gravely forward out of a small arched shrine, the walls of which are decorated with brilliant paintings. Her color is red and yellowish red, and is covered with dark blotches of a very dark green, which look almost black. Only one or two are of a bluish color. Her height is moderate. I stand about five foot nine, and I found that on her pedestal the line of her back was about level with my chest. The lower part of the body, much of which is concealed by the under block of limestone, is white, tinged with yellow. The tail is red. Above the head, open and closed lotus-flowers form a head-dress, with the lunar disk and two feathers. And the long lotus-stalks flow down on each side of the neck toward the ground. At the back of this head-dress are a scarab and a cartouche. The goddess is advancing solemnly and gently. A wonderful calm, a matchless, serene dignity, enfold her.
In the body of this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can do nearly everything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king kneels as a boy. Wonderfully expressive and solemnly refined is the cow’s face, which is of dark color, like the color of almost black earth—earth fertilized by the Nile. Dignified, dominating, almost but just not stern, strongly intelligent, and, through its beautiful intelligence, entirely sympathetic (“to understand all, is to pardon all”), this face, once thoroughly seen, completely noticed, can never be forgotten. This is one of the most beautiful statues in the world.
When I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought of it and wished that it still stood there near the Colonnades of Thebes under the tiger-colored precipices. And then I thought of Hatshepsu. Surely she would not brook a rival to-day near the temple which she made—a rival long lost and long forgotten. Is not her influence still there upon the terraced platforms, among the apricot and the white columns, near the paintings of the land of Punt? Did it not whisper to the antiquaries, even to the soldiers from Cairo, who guarded the Vache-Hathor in the night, to make haste to take her away far from the hills of Thebes and from the Nile’s long southern reaches, that the great queen might once more reign alone? They obeyed. Hatshepsu was appeased. And, like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, she rules at Deir-el-Bahari.
On the way to the tombs of the kings I went to the temple of Kurna, that lonely cenotaph, with its sand-colored massive façade, its heaps of fallen stone, its wide and ruined doorway, its thick, almost rough, columns recalling Medinet-Abu. There is not very much to see, but from there one has a fine view of other temples—of the Ramesseum, looking superb, like a grand skeleton; of Medinet-Abu, distant, very pale gold in the morning sunlight; of little Deir-al-Medinet, the pretty child of the Ptolemies, with the heads of the seven Hathors. And from Kurna the Colossi are exceptionally grand and exceptionally personal, so personal that one imagines one sees the expressions of the faces that they no longer possess.
Even if you do not go into the tombs—but you will go—you must ride to the tombs of the kings; and you must, if you care for the finesse of impressions, ride on a blazing day and toward the hour of noon. Then the ravine is itself, like the great act that demonstrates a temperament. It is the narrow home of fire, hemmed in by brilliant colors, nearly all—perhaps quite all—of which could be found in a glowing furnace. Every shade of yellow is there—lemon yellow, sulphur yellow, the yellow of amber, the yellow of orange with its tendency toward red, the yellow of gold, sand color, sun color. Cannot all these yellows be found in a fire? And there are the reds—pink of the carnation, pink of the coral, red of the little rose that grows in certain places of sands, red of the bright flame’s heart. And all these colors are mingled in complete sterility. And all are fused into a fierce brotherhood by the sun. and like a flood, they seem flowing to the red and the yellow mountains, like a flood that is flowing to its sea. You are taken by them toward the mountains, on and on, till the world is closing in, and you know the way must come to an end. And it comes to an end—in a tomb.
You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets you in, and wants to follow you in. Prevent him if you can. Pay him. Go in alone. For this is the tomb of Amenhotep II.; and he himself is here, far down, at rest under the mountain, this king who lived and reigned more than fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. The ravine-valley leads to him, and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart of the living rock, in the dull heat of the earth’s bowels, which is like no other heat. You descend by stairs and corridors, you pass over a well by a bridge, you pass through a naked chamber; and the king is not there. And you go on down another staircase, and along another corridor, and you come into a pillared chamber, with paintings on its walls, and on its pillars, paintings of the king in the presence of the gods of the underworld, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain in whose breast you have all this time been walking, there is a crypt. And you turn away from the bright paintings, and down there you see the king.
Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the Royal Academy at Burlington House. I went in the afternoon, when the galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers, gossips, quidnuncs, andflaneurs; with authors, fashionable lawyers, and doctors; with men and women of the world; with young dandies and actressesen vogue. A roar of voices went up to the roof. Every one was talking, smiling, laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a little picture of the very worldly world that loves the things of to-day and the chime of the passing hours. And suddenly some people near me were silent, and some turned their heads to stare with a strangely fixed attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking slowly on legs like sticks. It was clad in black, with a gleam of color. Above it was a face so intensely thin that it was like the face of death. And in this face shone two eyes that seemed full of—the other world. And, like a breath from the other world passing, this man went by me and was hidden from me by the throng. It was Cardinal Manning in the last days of his life.
The face of the king is like his, but it has an even deeper pathos as it looks upward to the rock. And the king’s silence bids you be silent, and his immobility bids you be still. And his sad, and unutterable resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is sifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. And you feel the touch of time, but the touch of eternity, too. And as, in that rock-hewn sanctuary, you whisper “Pax vobiscum,” you say it for all the world.
Prayer pervades the East. Far off across the sands, when one is traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising toward the sky. A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to Allah. And where there are no minarets—in the great wastes of the dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken even by any lonely, wandering bird—the camels are stopped at the appointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are laid down, the brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. And the rich man spreads his carpet, and prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads nothing; but he prays, too. The East is full of lust and full of money-getting, and full of bartering, and full of violence; but it is full of worship—of worship that disdains concealment, that recks not of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do not pray. They do not laugh at the man who does, like the unpraying Christian. There is nothing ludicrous to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays in the stern of your dahabiyeh; and your Egyptian boatman prays by the rudder of your boat; and your black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock in the sand; and your camel-man prays when you are resting in the noontide, watching the far-off quivering mirage, lost in some wayward dream.
And must you not pray, too, when you enter certain temples where once strange gods were worshipped in whom no man now believes?
There is one temple on the Nile which seems to embrace in its arms all the worship of the past; to be full of prayers and solemn praises; to be the holder, the noble keeper, of the sacred longings, of the unearthly desires and aspirations, of the dead. It is the temple of Edfu. From all the other temples it stands apart. It is the temple of inward flame, of the secret soul of man; of that mystery within us that is exquisitely sensitive, and exquisitely alive; that has longings it cannot tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, and loves it can only love.
To Horus it was dedicated—hawk-headed Horus—the son of Isis and Osiris, who was crowned with many crowns, who was the young Apollo of the old Egyptian world. But though I know this, I am never able to associate Edfu with Horus, that child wearing the side-lock—when he is not hawk-headed in his solar aspect—that boy with his finger in his mouth, that youth who fought against Set, murderer of his father.
Edfu, in its solemn beauty, in its perfection of form, seems to me to pass into a region altogether beyond identification with the worship of any special deity, with particular attributes, perhaps with particular limitations; one who can be graven upon walls, and upon architraves and pillars painted in brilliant colors; one who can personally pursue a criminal, like some policeman in the street; even one who can rise upon the world in the visible glory of the sun. To me, Edfu must always represent the world-worship of “the Hidden One”; not Amun, god of the dead, fused with Ra, with Amsu, or with Khnum: but that other “Hidden One,” who is God of the happy hunting-ground of savages, with whom the Buddhist strives to merge his strange serenity of soul; who is adored in the “Holy Places” by the Moslem, and lifted mystically above the heads of kneeling Catholics in cathedrals dim with incense, and merrily praised with the banjo and the trumpet in the streets of black English cities; who is asked for children by longing women, and for new dolls by lisping babes; whom the atheist denies in the day, and fears in the darkness of night; who is on the lips alike of priest and blasphemer, and in the soul of all human life.
Edfu stands alone, not near any other temple. It is not pagan; it is not Christian: it is a place in which to worship according to the dictates of your heart.
Edfu stands alone on the bank of the Nile between Luxor and Assuan. It is not very far from El-Kab, once the capital of Upper Egypt, and it is about two thousand years old. The building of it took over one hundred and eighty years, and it is the most perfectly preserved temple to-day of all the antique world. It is huge and it is splendid. It has towers one hundred and twelve feet high, a propylon two hundred and fifty-two feet broad, and walls four hundred and fifty feet long. Begun in the reign of Ptolemy III., it was completed only fifty-seven years before the birth of Christ.
You know these facts about it, and you forget them, or at least you do not think of them. What does it all matter when you are alone in Edfu? Let the antiquarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the stone; let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches: but let us wander at ease, and worship and regard the exquisite form, and drink in the mystical spirit, of this very wonderful temple.
Do you care about form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection. Edfu is the consecration of form. In proportion it is supreme above all other Egyptian temples. Its beauty of form is like the chiselled loveliness of a perfect sonnet. While the world lasts, no architect can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity. Or so it seems to me. I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe—of the Alhambra at Granada, of the Cappella Palatina in the palace at Palermo. And Edfu I place with them—Edfu utterly different from them, more different, perhaps, even than they are from each other, but akin to them, as all great beauty is mysteriously akin. I have spent morning after morning in the Alhambra, and many and many an hour in the Cappella Palatina; and never have I been weary of either, or longed to go away. And this same sweet desire to stay came over me in Edfu. TheLouliawas tied up by the high bank of the Nile. The sailors were glad to rest. There was no steamer sounding its hideous siren to call me to its crowded deck. So I yielded to my desire, and for long I stayed in Edfu. And when at last I left it I said to myself, “This is a supreme thing,” and I knew that within me had suddenly developed the curious passion for buildings that some people never feel, and that others feel ever growing and growing.
Yes, Edfu is supreme. No alteration could improve it. Any change made in it, however slight, could only be harmful to it. Pure and perfect is its design—broad propylon, great open courtyard with pillared galleries, halls, chambers, sanctuary. Its dignity and its sobriety are matchless. I know they must be, because they touched me so strangely, with a kind of reticent enchantment, and I am not by nature enamored of sobriety, of reticence and calm, but am inclined to delight in almost violent force, in brilliance, and, especially, in combinations of color. In the Alhambra one finds both force and fairylike lightness, delicious proportions, delicate fantasy, a spell as of subtle magicians; in the Cappella Palatina, a jeweled splendor, combined with a small perfection of form which simply captivates the whole spirit and leads it to adoration. In Edfu you are face to face with hugeness and with grandeur; but soon you are scarcely aware of either—in the sense, at least, that connects these qualities with a certain overwhelming, almost striking down, of the spirit and the faculties. What you are aware of is your own immense and beautiful calm of utter satisfaction—a calm which has quietly inundated you, like a waveless tide of the sea. How rare it is to feel this absolute satisfaction, this praising serenity! The critical spirit goes, like a bird from an opened window. The excited, laudatory, voluble spirit goes. And this splendid calm is left. If you stay here, you, as this temple has been, will be molded into a beautiful sobriety. From the top of the pylon you have received this still and glorious impression from the matchless design of the whole building, which you see best from there. When you descend the shallow staircase, when you stand in the great court, when you go into the shadowy halls, then it is that the utter satisfaction within you deepens. Then it is that you feel the need to worship in this place created for worship.
The ancient Egyptians made most of their temples in conformity with a single type. The sanctuary was at the heart, the core, of each temple—the sanctuary surrounded by the chambers in which were laid up the precious objects connected with ceremonies and sacrifices. Leading to this core of the temple, which was sometimes called “the divine house,” were various halls the roofs of which were supported by columns—those hypostyle halls which one sees perpetually in Egypt. Before the first of these halls was a courtyard surrounded by a colonnade. In the courtyard the priests of the temple assembled. The people were allowed to enter the colonnade. A gateway with towers gave entrance to the courtyard. If one visits many of the Egyptian temples, one soon becomes aware of the subtlety, combined with a sort of high simplicity and sense of mystery and poetry, of these builders of the past. As a great writer leads one on, with a concealed but beautiful art, from the first words to which all the other words are ministering servants; as the great musician—Wagner in his “Meistersinger,” for instance—leads one from the first notes of his score to those final notes which magnificently reveal to the listeners the real meaning of those first notes, and of all the notes which follow them: so the Egyptian builders lead the spirit gently, mysteriously forward from the gateway between the towers to the distant house divine. When one enters the outer court, one feels the far-off sanctuary. Almost unconsciously one is aware that for that sanctuary all the rest of the temple was created; that to that sanctuary everything tends. And in spirit one is drawn softly onward to that very holy place. Slowly, perhaps, the body moves from courtyard to hypostyle hall, and from one hall to another. Hieroglyphs are examined, cartouches puzzled out, paintings of processions, or bas-reliefs of pastimes and of sacrifices, looked at with care and interest; but all the time one has the sense of waiting, of a want unsatisfied. And only when one at last reaches the sanctuary is one perfectly at rest. For then the spirit feels: “This is the meaning of it all.”
One of the means which the Egyptian architects used to create this sense of approach is very simple, but perfectly effective. It consisted only in making each hall on a very slightly higher level than the one preceding it, and the sanctuary, which is narrow and mysteriously dark on the highest level of all. Each time one takes an upward step, or walks up a little incline of stone, the body seems to convey to the soul a deeper message of reverence and awe. In no other temple is this sense of approach to the heart of a thing so acute as it is when one walks in Edfu. In no other temple, when the sanctuary is reached, has one such a strong consciousness of being indeed within a sacred heart.
The color of Edfu is a pale and delicate brown, warm in the strong sunshine, but seldom glowing. Its first doorway is extraordinarily high, and is narrow, but very deep, with a roof showing traces of that delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the right, just where the guardian stands; this guardian, the gift of the past, squat, even fat, with a very perfect face of a determined and handsome man. In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning forward, and very much defaced. And in this great courtyard there are swarms of living birds, twittering in the sunshine. Through the doorway between the towers one sees a glimpse of a native village with the cupolas of a mosque.
I stood and looked at the cupolas for a moment. Then I turned, and forgot for a time the life of the world without—that men, perhaps, were praying beneath those cupolas, or praising the Moslem’s God. For when I turned, I felt, as I have said, as if all the worship of the world must be concentrated here. Standing far down the open court, in the full sunshine, I could see into the first hypostyle hall, but beyond only a darkness—a darkness which led me on, in which the further chambers of the house divine were hidden. As I went on slowly, the perfection of the plan of the dead architects was gradually revealed to 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 for ever. 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 jewelled 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 strangenessbizarrerie, absurdity, every wild scheme of hues, every preposterous subject—to take an extreme instance, a camel, wearing a top-hat, and lighted up by fire-works, 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 house divine of “the Hidden One,” whom the nations of the world 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.