Behold Me Then, For Some Two Or Three Hours, Alone Among The Temples
Of The Pharaohs.
The tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at
this moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return till
very late, when the full moon will have risen and be shedding its
clear light upon the ruins.
My post, while I waited, was high up among
the ruins on the margin of the sacred Lake of Osiris, the still and
enclosed water of which is astonishing in that it has remained there
for so many centuries. It still conceals, no doubt, numberless
treasures confided to it in the days of slaughters and pillages, when
the armies of the Persian and Nubian kings forced the thick,
surrounding walls.
In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at the bottom of this
water, reflecting symmetrically the veritable ones which now
scintillate everywhere in the heavens. A sudden cold spreads over the
town-mummy, whose stones, still warm from their exposure to the sun,
cool very rapidly in this nocturnal blue which envelops them as in a
shroud. I am free to wander where I please without risk of meeting
anyone, and I begin to descend by the steps made by the falling of the
granite blocks, which have formed on all sides staircases as if for
giants. On the overturned surfaces, my hands encounter the deep,
clear-cut hollows of the hieroglyphs, and sometimes of those
inevitable people, carved in profile, who raise their arms, all of
them, and make signs to one another. On arriving at the bottom I am
received by a row of statues with battered faces, seated on thrones,
and without hindrance of any kind, and recognising everything in the
blue transparency which takes the place of day, I come to the great
avenue of the palaces of Amen.
We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable to this
avenue, which passive multitudes took nearly three thousand years to
construct, expending, century after century, their innumerable
energies in carrying these stones, which our machines now could not
move. And the objective was always the same: to prolong indefinitely
the perspectives of pylons, colossi and obelisks, continuing always
this same artery of temples and palaces in the direction of the old
Nile - while the latter, on the contrary, receded slowly, from century
to century, towards Libya. It is here, and especially at night, that
you suffer the feeling of having been shrunken to the size of a pygmy.
All round you rise monoliths mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty
paces to pass the base of a single one of them. They are placed quite
close together, too close, it seems, in view of their enormity and
mass. There is not enough air between them, and the closeness of their
juxtaposition disconcerts you more, perhaps, even than their
massiveness.
The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as
disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes - the hall of the
feasts of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, that this king
gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these
ceilings, of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty
men? In places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost
diaphanous in the air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in
unbroken alignment against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the
destruction is bewildering; fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-
reliefs lie about in indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered
wreckage after a world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the
hand of man should overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at
different times, have also come to shake this Cyclops palace which
threatened to be eternal. And all this - which represents such an
excess of force, of movement, of impulsion, alike for its erection as
for its overthrow - all this is tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil,
although toppling as if for an imminent downfall - tranquil forever,
one might say, congealed by the cold and by the night.
I was prepared for silence in such a place, but not for the sounds
which I commence to hear. First of all an osprey sounds the prelude,
above my head and so close to me that it holds me trembling throughout
its long cry. Then other voices answer from the depths of the ruins,
voices very diverse, but all sinister. Some are only able to mew on
two long-drawn notes: some yelp like jackals round a cemetery, and
others again imitate the sound of a steel spring slowly unwinding
itself. And this concert comes always from above. Owls, ospreys,
screech-owls, all the different kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and
round eyes, and silken wings that enable them to fly noiselessly, have
their homes amongst the granites massively upheld in the air; and they
are celebrating now, each after its own fashion, the nocturnal
festival. Intermittent calls break upon the air, and long-drawn
infinitely mournful wailings, that sometimes swell and sometimes seem
to be strangled and end in a kind of sob. And then, in spite of the
sonority of the vast straight walls, in spite of the echoes which
prolong the cries, the silence obstinately returns. Silence. The
silence after all and beyond all doubt is the true master at this hour
of this kingdom at once colossal, motionless and blue - a silence that
seems to be infinite, because we know that there is nothing around
these ruins, nothing but the line of the dead sands, the threshold of
the deserts.
*****
I retrace my steps towards the west in the direction of the hypostyle,
traversing again the avenue of monstrous splendours, imprisoned and,
as it were, dwarfed between the rows of sovereign stones. There are
obelisks there, some upright, some overthrown. One like those of
Luxor, but much higher, remains intact and raises its sharp point into
the sky; others, less well known in their exquisite simplicity, are
quite plain and straight from base to summit, bearing only in relief
gigantic lotus flowers, whose long climbing stems bloom above in the
half light cast by the stars.
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