The Spell of Egypt

owels of mercy, pitiless and determined, strike awe to the soul, mingled with the almost gasping admiration that power wakes in man. Some bring a sense of heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like cer

es with Luxor beneath the little tapering minaret whence the call to prayer drops down to be answered by the angelus bell; falls into a reverie in the "thinking place" of Rameses II., near to the giant that was once the mightiest of all Egyptian statues; eagerly wakes to the fascination of rec

ent and an air of summing up, that Karnak was "very nice indeed." There she was wrong-Scotch and wrong. Karnak is not nice. No temple that I have seen up

n of statues, its obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dreams to things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy specters, and from these to hard and piercing realities at the cruel will of

es. Along the path that led from it, coming toward the avenue of sphinxes with ram's-heads that watch for ever before the temple door, a great white camel stepped, its rider a tiny child with a close, white cap upon his head. The child was singing to the glory of the sunset, or was it to the glory of Amun, "the hidden one," once the local god of Thebes, to whom the grandest temple in the world was dedicated? I listen to the childish, quavering voice, twitte

was singing as he p

e, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile began to gleam. Upon its steel and silver torches of amber flame were lighted. The Libyan mountains became spectral beyond the tombs of the kings. The tiny, rough cupolas that mark a grave close to the sphinxes, in daytime

nion, which crouches before the kiosk of Taharga, the King of Ethiopia; upon those two who stand together as if devoted, yet by their attitudes seem to express characters diametrically opposed, grey men and vivid, the one with folded arms calling to Peace, the other with arms stretched down in a gesture of crude determination, summoning War, as if from the underworld; upon the granite foot and ankle in the temple of Rameses III., which in their perfection, like the headless Victory in Paris, and the Niobide Chiaramonti in the Vatican, suggest a great personality that once met with is not to be forgotten: upon these and their companions, who would not forsake the halls and courts where once they dwelt with splendor, where now they dwell with ruin that attracts the gaping world. The moon was risen, but the west was still full of color and light. It faded. There was a pause. Only a bar of d

to the sky-color ethereal, trembling as if it knew it ought not to return. Yet it stayed for a while and even glowed, though it looked always strangely purified, and full of a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were no longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised surely by a supreme artist to heighten here and there the beauty of the sky. Everything that moved against the afterglow-man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse-became at once an ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving it, the color in which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched serenely, as if he knew the

quietly over the

ought wonders at Deir-el-Bahari, and who is more familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left there traces, and nearer, to the right, Rameses III. had made a temple, surely for the birds, so fond they are of it, so pertinaciously they haunt it. Rameses II., mutilated and immense, stood on guard before the terrific hall of Seti I.; and between him and my platform in the air rose the solitary lotus column that prepares you for the wonder of Seti's hall, which otherwise might almost overwhelm you-unless you are a Scotch lady in a helmet. And Khuns had his temple here by the Sphinx of the twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who created "the sun egg and the moon egg," and who was said-only said, alas!-to have established on earth the "everlasting justice," had his, and still their stones receive the silver moon-rays

rn belief, and I ignored eras, ambitions, glory, and belief, and thought only of form, and height, of the miracle of blackness against silver, and of the pathos of statues whose ever-open ey

t sand lies, placing silence beneath your footsteps. The pale brown of walls and columns, almost yellow in the sunshine, is delicate and soothing, and inclines the heart to calm. Delicious, suggestive of a beautiful tapestry, rich and ornate, yet always quiet, are the brown reliefs upon the stone. What are they? Does it matter? They soften the walls, make them more personal, more tender. That surely is their mission. This temple holds for me a spell. As soon as I enter it, I feel the touch of the lotus, as if an invisible and kindly hand swept a blossom lightly across my face and downward to my heart. This courtyard, these small chambers beyond it, that

ess in desire, limitless in industry, limitless in will. And at the tops of the columns blooms the lotus, the symbol of rising. What a triumph in stone this hall was once, what a triumph in stone its ruin is to-day! Perhaps, among temples, it is the most wondrous thing in all Egypt, as it was, no doubt, the most wondrous temple in the world; among temples I say, for the Sphinx is of all the marvels of Egypt by far the most marvellous. The grandeur of this hall almost moves one to tears, like the marching past of

p! Allah g

! Allah gi

ed by the triumph all can see. I like to hear the workmen's voices withi

ce between the rows of statues with their arms folded upon their quiet breasts, to gaze into the tender darkness beyond

the bugle-call and silence-