KARNAK AND ITS RUINS.
“And now we galloped forward, through a long procession of camels, donkeys, and desert Arabs armed with spears, toward Karnak, the greatest ruin in the world, the crowning triumph of Egyptian power and Egyptian art. Except a broken stone here and there protruding through the soil, the plain is as desolate as if it had never been conscious of a human dwelling; and only on reaching the vicinity of the mud hamlet of Karnak, can the traveler realize that he is in Thebes. Here the camel-path drops into a broad excavated avenue, lined with fragments of sphinxes and shaded by starveling acacias. As you advance, the sphinxes are better preserved and remain seated on their pedestals, but they have all been decapitated. Though of colossal proportions, they are seated so close to each other, that it must have required nearly two thousand to form the double row to Luxor. The avenue finally reaches a single pylon, of majestic proportions, built by one of the Ptolemies, and covered with profuse hieroglyphics. Passing through this, the sphinxes lead you to another pylon, followed by a pillared court and a temple built by the later Remesides. This, I thought, while my friend was measuring the girth of the pillars, is a good beginning for Karnak, but it is certainly much less than I expect. ‘Tāāl min hennee!’ (come this way!) called the guide, as if reading my mind, and led me up the heaps of rubbish to the roof and pointed to the north. Ah, there was Karnak! Had I been blind up to this time, or had the earth suddenly heaved out of her breast the remains of the glorious temple? From all parts of the plain of Thebes I had seen it in the distance—a huge propylon, a shattered portico, and an obelisk, rising above the palms. Whence this wilderness of ruins, spreading so far as to seem a city rather than a temple; pylon after pylon, tumbling into enormous cubes of stone, long colonnades, supporting fragments of Titanic roofs, obelisks of red granite, and endless walls and avenues, branching out to isolated portals? Yet they stood as silently amid the accumulated rubbish of nearly four thousand years, and the sunshine threw its yellow luster as serenely over the despoiled sanctuaries, as if it had never been otherwise since the world began. Figures are of no use, in describing a place like this, but since I must use them, I may say that the length of the ruins before us, from west to east, was twelve hundred feet, and that the total circumference of Karnak, including its numerous pylæ, or gateways, is a mile and a half.
“We mounted and rode with fast-beating hearts to the western or main entrance, facing the Nile. The two towers of the propylon (pyramidal masses of solid stone) are three hundred and twenty-nine feet in length, and the one which is least ruined, is nearly one hundred feet in hight. On each side of the sculptured portal connecting them, is a tablet left by the French army, recording the geographical position of the principal Egyptian temples. We passed through, and entered an open court, more than three hundred feet square, with a corridor of immense pillars on each side, connecting it with the towers of a second pylon, nearly as gigantic as the first. A colonnade of lofty shafts, leading through the center of the court, once united the two entrances, but they have all been hurled down, and lay as they fell, in long lines of disjointed blocks, except one, which holds its solitary lotus-bell against the sky. Two mutilated colossi of red granite still guard the doorway, whose lintel-stones are forty feet in length. Climbing over the huge fragments which have fallen from above and almost blocked up the passage, we looked down into the grand hall of the temple. I knew the dimensions of this hall, beforehand; I knew the number and size of the pillars, but I was no more prepared for the reality than those will be, who may read this account of it and afterward visit Karnak for themselves. It is the great good luck of travel that many things must be seen to be known. Nothing could have compensated for the loss of that overwhelming confusion of awe, astonishment, and delight, which came upon me like a flood. I looked down an avenue of twelve pillars, six on each side, each of which was thirty-six feet in circumference and nearly eighty feet in hight. Crushing as were these ponderous masses of sculptured stone, the spreading bell of the lotus-blossoms which crowned them, clothed them with an atmosphere of lightness and grace. In front, over the top of another pile of colossal blocks, two obelisks rose sharp and clear, with every emblem legible on their polished sides. On each side of the main aisle are seven other rows of columns, one hundred and twenty-two in all; each of which is about fifty feet high and twenty-seven in circumference. They have the Osiride form, without capitals, and do not range with the central shafts. In the efforts of the conquerors to overthrow them, two have been hurled from their places and thrown against the neighboring ones, where they still lean, as if weary with holding up the roof of massive sandstone. I walked alone through this hall, trying to bear the weight of its unutterable majesty and beauty. That I had been so oppressed by Dendera, seemed a weakness which I was resolved to conquer, and I finally succeeded in looking on Karnak with a calmness more commensurate with its sublime repose; but not by daylight. My next visit was at night, at the time of the full moon. There was a wan haze in the air, and a pale halo around the moon, on each side of which appeared two faint mock-moons. It was a ghostly light, and the fresh north wind, coming up the Nile, rustled solemnly in the palm-trees. We trotted silently to Karnak, and leaped our horses over the fragments until we reached the foot of the first obelisk. Here we dismounted and entered the grand hall of pillars. There was no sound in all the temple, and the guide, who seemed to comprehend my wish, moved behind me as softly as a shadow, and spoke not a word. It needs this illumination to comprehend Karnak. The unsightly rubbish has disappeared: the rents in the roof are atoned for by the moonlight they admit; the fragments shivered from the lips of the mighty capitals are only the crumpled edges of the flower; a maze of shadows hides the desolation of the courts, but every pillar and obelisk, pylon and propylon is glorified by the moonlight. The soul of Karnak is soothed and tranquillized. Its halls look upon you no longer with an aspect of pain and humiliation. Every stone seems to say: ‘I am not fallen, for I have defied the ages. I am a part of that grandeur which has never seen its peer, and I shall endure forever, for the world has need of me.’ I climbed to the roof, and sat looking down into the hushed and awful colonnades, till I was thoroughly penetrated with their august and sublime expression. I should probably have remained all night, an amateur colossus, with my hands on my knees, had not the silence been disturbed by two arrivals of romantic tourists, an Englishman and two Frenchmen. We exchanged salutations, and I mounted my restless mare again, touched her side with the stirrup, and sped back to Luxor. The guide galloped beside me, occasionally hurling his spear into the air and catching it as it fell, delighted with my readiness to indulge his desert whims. I found the captain and sailors all ready and my friend smoking his pipe on deck. In half an hour we had left Thebes.”
Such is a faint view of these ruins of forty centuries, the remains of that splendid city, Thebes, in comparison with which New York is but an infant to the mighty giant! “Yes, proud upstart of this nineteenth century,” says Thompson, “the so-called Empire city, commercial emporium of the west, great metropolis of the new world, if thy rivers should sweep over and bury thee, not all the stone of the Croton reservoir, and the city hall, and the Astor house, and of a hundred churches forsooth, would make one pile like Karnak; nor could any of these furnish a single stone for the lintels of its gates. Yet Karnak, which began to be in that other nineteenth century before Christ, is not yet a ruin! Its gateways stand; its grand hall stands, its columns nearly all unbroken, and not one spire of grass, or tuft of moss, or leaf of ivy, hides its speaking sculptures. Only the sand has covered them; and when this is removed, they are as fresh as yesterday.”
“Such is the skeleton of Thebes, as we can reconstruct it of such materials and from such localities as yet mark its site. But what was Thebes when, resting upon the Lybian mountains on the west and the Arabian on the east, with the Nile flowing through its center, it filled a circuit of twenty-five miles in a plain of twice that area, teeming with fertility! What was Thebes when she could pour forth twenty thousand chariots of war, and when the grand triumphal procession of priests, and officers of state, and soldiers, and captives, swept through these colossal avenues to grace the conqueror’s return! What was Thebes when, by the way of the Red sea, Arabia and the Indies poured all their commerce into her lap, and the Nile brought her the spoils of Ethiopia and of the great sea! What was Thebes when she possessed wealth, and mechanic arts, and physical force, to rear such monuments even in the midst of war, and sometimes more than one in the reign of a single monarch! What was Thebes, with all the arts and inventions of civilized life that are sculptured upon the tombs of her kings to mark the progress of their day; from building arches and bridges, to glass-blowing and porcelain manufactures, to the making of umbrellas, fans, chairs, and divans, fine linens, and all the appurtenances of a modern drawing-room! What was Thebes when all merchants resorted thither from Persia, from Ethiopia, from Lybia, and the Levant! What was Thebes when the artists and scholars of infant Greece and Rome went thither to school! Was not Egypt the mother of nations? Where is the art of Greece or Rome that was not tutored in Egypt; that has not simply graced Egyptian forms—nor always this? Where is the philosophy of Greece or Rome that was not borrowed from Egypt? Even the divine Plato, who only waited for the true Logos, learned at Egypt’s shrine. Egypt gave birth to art, gave birth to thought, before Greece and Rome were born. She was the grand repository of human power; the originator of all great forms of human development; the originator, the inventor, the great prototype of the world’s history, here laid up in her hieroglyphic archives. In all material things, yes, and in all great intellectual forms, in poetry, in art, in philosophy, in science, and in the religion of nature, this nineteenth century is but the recipient of the mighty past. Whatever she has of these, she but inherits through Rome and Greece from their old mother Egypt. What she has better than these, she has by gift divine, through that Christianity which purifies, enfranchises, and ennobles man, reforms society, and makes free the state. If she hold fast by this, she will become resplendent with a glory that Egypt never knew; but if she slight this, and sell her birthright for luxury and power, the meanest grave at Thebes would suffice to bury this nineteenth century with its boasted inventions.“