Without Conviction Now, We Make Our Way Towards Another Temple,
Guaranteed Solitary.
Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in
the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again
into their folds.
Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis
of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II. But the sands have
covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to
preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts. Men in
their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins,
protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve
feet from the ground. In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures
have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders
have disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to
have preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated
pantomime of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange,
more striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they
have preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of
their antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their
robes of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow.
It is an artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by
remaining perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people
did seems as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such
brilliant colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic
monuments, and that here they are heightened by the white background.
For, notwithstanding the bluish, black and red granite of the
porticoes, the walls are all of a fine limestone, of exceeding
whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of a pure alabaster.
[*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the neighbourhood,
discovering that the limestone of its walls was friable, used this
temple as a quarry, and for some years bas-reliefs beyond price
served as aliment to the mills of the factory.
Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert
appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow
swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated
people. It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the
foot of the Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the
solitudes, shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another
in the sands until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line
against the sky. Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand,
and that of Seti in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook
& Son flourishes, there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and
pulverised beyond all possible redemption. But they give us pause,
these disappearing ruins, for they are the debris of that ageless
temple, where sleeps the head of the god, the debris of the tombs of
the Middle and Ancient Empires, and they indicate still the wide
extent and development of the necropoles of Abydos, so old that it
almost makes one giddy to think of their beginning.
Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs of the Egyptians are met
with only amongst the sands and the parched rocks. The great ancestral
people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the
corruption of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the
midst of this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call
the desert.
*****
And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin drivers, is
being driven in the direction of the adjacent temple, dedicated to the
god by Seti! The luncheon no doubt is over and the band about to
depart, sharp to the appointed hour of the programme. Let us watch
them from a prudent distance.
To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, these Cooks and
Cookesses, and opening, not without a conscious air of majesty, their
white cotton parasols, take themselves off in the direction of the
Nile. They disappear and the place belongs to us.
When we venture at last to return to the first sanctuary, where they
had lunched their fill in the shade, the guardians are busy clearing
away the leavings and the dirty paper. And they pack the dubious
crockery, which will be required for to-morrow's luncheon, into large
chests on which may be read in large letters of glory the names of the
veritable sovereigns of modern Egypt: "Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt
Ltd.)."
All this happily ends with the first hypostyle. Nothing dishonours the
halls of the interior, where silence has again descended, the vast
silence of the noon of the desert.
In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, men already marvelled at this
temple, as at a relic of the most distant and nebulous past. The
geographer Strabo wrote in those days: "It is an admirable palace
built in the fashion of the Labyrinth save that it has fewer
galleries." There are galleries enough however, and one can readily
lose oneself in its mazy turnings. Seven chapels, consecrated to
Osiris and to different gods and goddesses of his suite; seven vaulted
chambers; seven doors for the processions of kings and multitudes;
and, at the sides, numberless halls, corridors, secondary chapels,
dark chambers and hidden doorways. That very primitive column,
suggestive of reeds, which is called in architecture the "plant
column" and resembles a monstrous stem of papyrus, rises here in a
thick forest, to support the stones of the blue ceilings, which are
strewn with stars, in the likeness of the sky of this country. In many
cases these stones are missing and leave large openings on to the real
sky above. Their massiveness, which one might have thought would
secure them an endless duration, has availed them nothing; the sun of
so many centuries has cracked them, and their own weight, then, has
brought them headlong to the ground.
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