Egypt -- Antiquities; Egypt -- Description and travel
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 theirs 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.
XII
DEIR-EL-BAHARI
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
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATASU DEIR-EL-BAHARI]
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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