Behind us the portico recedes
little by little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as
mournful and solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of
meadows, which spread their peace where once was a centre of
magnificence.
The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts - the wind of Egypt that
never seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of
the sun. The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its
young quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one
another and turn their backs to the squall.
As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of
ruins. And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are
the remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here
for some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of
time in the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become
in time mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and
sometimes even in the submerging sands.
A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses;
a heap of broken jars or amphorae - myriads of them - that served to
carry the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of
walls, repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with
hieroglyphs lie upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or
Coptic sculptures or Roman capitals. In our countries, where the past
is of yesterday, we have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead
things.
Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill
of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on
all sides like a jealous rampart. Until recently indeed they covered
it almost to its roof. From the very first its appearance is
disconcerting: it is so grand, so austere and gloomy. A strange
dwelling, to be sure, for the Goddess of Love and Joy. It seems more
fit to be the home of the Prince of Darkness and of Death. A severe
doorway, built of gigantic stones and surmounted by a winged disc,
opens on to an asylum of religious mystery, on to depths where massive
columns disappear in the darkness of deep night.
Immediately on entering there is a coolness and a resonance as of a
sepulchre. First, the pronaos, where we still see clearly, between
pillars carved with hieroglyphs. Were it not for the large human faces
which serve for the capitals of the columns, and are the image of the
lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this temple of the decadent
epoch would scarcely differ from those built in this country two
thousand years before. It has the same square massiveness.
And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with
stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in
bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who
gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands - eternally
the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere - in the
palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri
of the mummies.
The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many
centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in
consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs,
their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious
mystery. But in the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the contrary,
except for some figures mutilated by the hammers of Christians or
Moslems, everything has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still
throw their fearsome shadows.
The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos. Then
come, one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the
daylight enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting
the superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the
walls. And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of
this heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep
gloom. The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the "Hall of
Mystery" and formerly the high priest /alone, and he only once in each
year/, had the right to enter it for the performance of some now
unknown rites.
The "Hall of Mystery" is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the
emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it. The meagre
little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness
which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the
most they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast
rectangular cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among
themselves their disconcerting mute conversations.
Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian
era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the
world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating
past, and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its
gods upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even
its religious rites and its mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here,
which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although
they had already discovered the /vault/, followed here the primitive
models, and continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs,
placed flat, like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built
though it was in the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site
venerable in the oldest antiquity, recalls at first sight some
conception of the Ramses.
