第55章

This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins--at the hour in which the light of the sun begins to turn to rose--I make my way along one of the magnificent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, which goes off at a right angle to the line of the temples of Amen, and, losing itself more or less in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on the border of which certain cat-headed goddesses are seated in state watching the dead water and the expanse of the desert. This particular road was begun three thousand four hundred years ago by a beautiful queen called Makeri,[*] and in the following centuries a number of kings continued its construction. It was ornamented with pylons of a superb massiveness--pylons are monumental walls, in the form of a trapezium with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, which the Egyptians used to place at either side of their porticoes and long avenues--as well as by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams, larger than buffaloes, crouched on pedestals.

[*] To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo.

At the first pylons I have to make a detour. They are so ruinous that their blocks, fallen down on all sides, have closed the passage. Here used to watch, on right and left, two upright giants of red granite from Syene. Long ago in times no longer precisely known, they were broken off, both of them, at the height of the loins. But their muscular legs have kept their proud, marching attitude, and each in one of the armless hands, which reach to the end of the cloth that girds their loins, clenches passionately the emblem of eternal life.

And this Syenite granite is so hard that time has not altered it in the least; in the midst of the confusion of stones the thighs of these mutilated giants gleam as if they had been polished yesterday.

Farther on we come upon the second pylons, foundered also, before which stands a row of Pharaohs.

On every side the overthrown blocks display their utter confusion of gigantic things in the midst of the sand which continues patiently to bury them. And here now are the third pylons, flanked by their two marching giants, who have neither head nor shoulders. And the road, marked majestically still by the debris, continues to lead towards the desert.

And then the fourth and last pylons, which seem at first sight to mark the extremity of the ruins, the beginning of the desert nothingness.

Time-worn and uncrowned, but stiff and upright still, they seem to be set there so solidly that nothing could ever overthrow them. The two colossal statues which guard them on the right and left are seated on thrones. One, that on the eastern side, has almost disappeared. But the other stands out entire and white, with the whiteness of marble, against the brown-coloured background of the enormous stretch of wall covered with hieroglyphs. His face alone has been mutilated; and he preserves still his imperious chin, his ears, his Sphinx's headgear, one might almost say his meditative expression, before this deployment of the vast solitude which seems to begin at his very feet.

Here however was only the boundary of the quarters of the God Amen.

The boundary of Thebes was much farther on, and the avenue which will lead me directly to the home of the cat-headed goddesses extends farther still to the old gates of the town; albeit you can scarcely distinguish it between the double row of Krio-sphinxes all broken and well-nigh buried.

The day falls, and the dust of Egypt, in accordance with its invariable practice every evening, begins to resemble in the distance a powder of gold. I look behind me from time to time at the giant who watches me, seated at the foot of his pylon on which the history of a Pharaoh is carved in one immense picture. Above him and above his wall, which grows each minute more rose-coloured, I see, gradually mounting in proportion as I move away from it, the great mass of the palaces of the centre, the hypostyle hall, the halls of 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.