Thothmes and
the obelisks, all the entangled cluster of those things at once so
grand and so dead, which have never been equalled on earth.
And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy
apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling
remains of a gigantic skeleton. They seem to be begging for a merciful
surcease, as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each
setting of the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.
All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the
outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples
and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.
The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now
reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer. His attitude
moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban
statues. With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary
mortal who had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days -
for many days and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the
transparency of these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined
in the distance under the dim light of the stars - a great phantom in
his contemplative pose. And I feel myself obsessed now by the
continuance of his attitude at this entrance of the ruins - I who shall
pass without a morrow from Thebes and even from the earth - even as we
all pass. Before conscious life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had
been there since times which make you shudder to think upon. For three
and thirty centuries, or thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown
men and women, who have gone before me, saw him just as I see him now,
tranquil and white, in this same place, seated before this same
threshold, with his head a little bent, and his pervading air of
thought.
[*] Statue of Amenophis III.
I make my way without hastening, having always a tendency to stop and
look behind me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the white
dreamer, which now are all illumined with a last Bengal fire in the
daily setting of the sun.
And the hour is already twilight when I reach the goddesses.
Their domain is so destroyed that the sands had succeeded in covering
and hiding it for centuries. But it has lately been exhumed.
There remain of it now only some fragments of columns, aligned in
multiple rows in a vast extent of desert. Broken and fallen stones and
debris.[*] I walk on without stopping, and at length reach the sacred
lake on the margin of which the great cats are seated in eternal
council, each one on her throne. The lake, dug by order of the
Pharaohs, is in the form of an arc, like a kind of crescent. Some
marsh birds, that are about to retire for the night, now traverse its
mournful, sleeping water. Its borders, which have known the utmost of
magnificence, are become mere heaps of ruins on which nothing grows.
And what one sees beyond, what the attentive goddesses themselves
regard, is the empty desolate plain, on which some few poor fields of
corn mingle in this twilight hour with the sad infinitude of the
sands. And the whole is bounded on the horizon by the chain, still a
little rose-coloured, of the limestones of Arabia.
[*] The temple of the Goddess Mut.
They are there, the cats, or, to speak more exactly, the lionesses,
for cats would not have those short ears, or those cruel chins,
thickened by tufts of beard. All of black granite, images of Sekhet
(who was the Goddess of War, and in her hours the Goddess of Lust),
they have the slender body of a woman, which makes more terrible the
great feline head surmounted by its high bonnet. Eight or ten, or
perhaps more, they are more disquieting in that they are so numerous
and so alike. They are not gigantic, as one might have expected, but
of ordinary human stature - easy therefore to carry away, or to
destroy, and that again, if one reflects, augments the singular
impression they cause. When so many colossal figures lie in pieces on
the ground, how comes it that they, little people seated so tranquilly
on their chairs, have contrived to remain intact, during the passing
of the three and thirty centuries of the world's history?
The passage of the march birds, which for a moment disturbed the clear
mirror of the lake, has ceased. Around the goddesses nothing moves and
the customary infinite silence envelops them as at the fall of every
night. They dwell indeed in such a forlorn corner of the ruins! Who,
to be sure, even in broad daylight, would think of visiting them?
Down there in the west a trailing cloud of dust indicates the
departure of the tourists, who had flocked to the temple of Amen, and
now hasten back to Luxor, to dine at the various /tables d'hote/. The
ground here is so felted with sand that in the distance we cannot hear
the rolling of their carriages. But the knowledge that they are gone
renders more intimate the interview with these numerous and identical
goddesses, who little by little have been draped in shadow. Their
seats turn their backs to the palaces of Thebes, which now begin to be
bathed in violet waves and seem to sink towards the horizon, to lose
each minute something of their importance before the sovereignty of
the night.
And the black goddesses, with their lioness' heads and tall headgear -
seated there with their hands upon their knees, with eyes fixed since
the beginning of the ages, and a disturbing smile on their thick lips,
like those of a wild beast - continue to regard - beyond the little dead
lake - that desert, which now is only a confused immensity, of a bluish
ashy-grey.
