It was still full two miles away; but it looked enormous—showing from this distance as a massive, low-browed, sharply defined mass of dead-white masonry. The walls sloped in slightly toward the top; and the façade appeared to be supported on eight square biers, with a large doorway in the center. If sculptured ornament, or cornice, or pictured legend enriched those walls, we were too far off to distinguish them. All looked strangely naked and solemn—more like a tomb than a temple.
Nor was the surrounding scene less deathlike in its solitude. Not a tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green monotony of the plain. Behind the temple, but divided from it by a farther space of mounded ruins, rose the mountains—pinky, aerial, with sheeny sand-drifts heaped in the hollows of their bare buttresses and spaces of soft blue shadow in their misty chasms. Where the range receded, a long vista of glittering desert opened to the Libyan horizon.
Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised causeway which apparently connected the mounds with some point down by the river, the details of the temple gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now see the curve and under shadow of the cornice; and a small object in front of the façade, which looked at first sight like a monolithic altar, resolved itself into a massive gateway, of the kind known as a single pylon. Nearer still, among some low outlying mounds, we came upon fragments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half-buried in rank grass—upon a series of stagnant niter-tanks and deserted workshops—upon the telegraph poles and wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the Soudan.
Egypt is the land of niter. It is found wherever a crude brick mound is disturbed or an antique stone structure demolished. The Nile mud is strongly impregnated with it; and in Nubia we used to find it lying in thick talc-like flakes upon the surface of rocks far above the present level of the inundation. These tanks at Denderah had been sunk, we are told, when the great temple was excavated by Abbas Pasha more than twenty years ago. The niter then found was utilized out of hand; washed and crystallized in the tanks; and converted into gunpowder in the adjacent workshops. The telegraph wires are more recent intruders, and the work of the khedive; but one longed to put them out of sight, to pull down the gunpowder sheds, and to fill up the tanks with débris. For what had the arts of modern warfare or the wonders of modern science to do with Hathor, the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades, the Nurse of Horus, the Egyptian Aphrodite, to whom yonder mountain of wrought stone and all these wastes were sacred?
We were by this time near enough to see that the square piers of the façade were neither square nor piers, but huge round columns with human-headed capitals; and that the walls, instead of being plain and tomb-like, were covered with an infinite multitude of sculptured figures. The pylon—rich with inscriptions and bas-reliefs, but disfigured by myriads of tiny wasps nests, like clustered mud-bubbles—now towered high above our heads and led to a walled avenue cut direct through the mounds and sloping downward to the main entrance of the temple.
Not, however, till we stood immediately under those ponderous columns, looking down upon the paved floor below and up to the huge cornice that projected overhead like the crest of an impending wave, did we realize the immense proportions of the building. Lofty as it looked from a distance, we now found that it was only the interior that had been excavated, and that not more than two-thirds of its actual height was visible above the mounds. The level of the avenue was, indeed, at its lowest part full twenty feet above that of the first great hall; and we had still a steep temporary staircase to go down before reaching the original pavement.
The effect of the portico as one stands at the top of this staircase is one of overwhelming majesty. Its breadth, its height, the massiveness of its parts, exceed in grandeur all that one has been anticipating throughout the long two miles of approach. The immense girth of the columns, the huge screens which connect them, the ponderous cornice jutting overhead, confuse the imagination, and in the absence of given measurements[32] appear, perhaps, even more enormous than they are. Looking up to the architrave, we see a kind of Egyptian Panathenaic procession of carven priests and warriors, some with standards and some with musical instruments. The winged globe, depicted upon a gigantic scale in the curve of the cornice, seems to hover above the central doorway. Hieroglyphs, emblems, strange forms of kings and gods, cover every foot of wall-space, frieze and pillar. Nor does this wealth of surface-sculpture tend in any way to diminish the general effect of size. It would seem, on the contrary, as if complex decoration were in this instance the natural complement to simplicity of form. Every group, every inscription, appears to be necessary and in its place; an essential part of the building it helps to adorn. Most of these details are as perfect as on the day when the last workman went his way and the architect saw his design completed. Time has neither marred the surface of the stone nor blunted the work of the chisel. Such injury as they have sustained is from the hand of man; and in no country has the hand of man achieved more and destroyed more than in Egypt. The Persians overthrew the masterpieces of the Pharaohs; the Copts mutilated the temples of the Ptolemies and Cæsars; the Arabs stripped the pyramids and carried Memphis away piece-meal. Here at Denderah we have an example of Græco-Egyptian work and early Christian fanaticism. Begun by Ptolemy XI.,[33] and bearing upon its
CLEOPATRA.
latest ovals the name and style of Nero, the present building was still comparatively new when, in A.D. 379, the ancient religion was abolished by the edict of Theodosius. It was then the most gorgeous as well as the most recent of all those larger temples built during the prosperous foreign rule of the last seven hundred years. It stood, surrounded by groves of palm and acacia, within the precincts of a vast inclosure, the walls of which, one thousand feet in length, thirty-five feet in height and fifteen feet thick, are still traceable. A dromos, now buried under twenty feet of débris, led from the pylon to the portico. The pylon is there still, a partial ruin; but the temple, with its roof, its staircases and its secret treasure-crypts, is in all essential respects as perfect as on the day when its splendor was given over to the spoilers. One can easily imagine how these spoilers sacked and ravaged all before them; how they desecrated the sacred places and cast down the statues of the goddess and divided the treasures of the sanctuary. They did not, it is true, commit such wholesale destruction as the Persian invaders of nine hundred years before; but they were merciless iconoclasts and hacked away the face of every figure within easy reach, both inside and outside the building.