“The ‘Luxor,’ again towed by the Sphynx, left Cherbourg on the 12th of September, and safely reached Havre de Grace, at the mouth of the Seine. Here her old companion, the Sphynx, which drew too much water to be able to ascend the river, left her, and she was taken in tow by the Neva steam-boat. To conclude with the words of our author: ‘At six o’clock (on the 13th) our vessel left the sea for ever, and entered the Seine. By noon we had cleared all the banks and impediments of the lower part of the river; and on the 14th of September at noon, we arrived at Rouen, where the ‘Luxor’ was made fast before the quay d’Harcourt. Here we must remain until the autumnal rains raise the waters of the Seine, and permit us to transport to Paris this pyramid,—the object of our expedition.’ This event has since happened, and the recent French papers announce that the obelisk has been set up in the centre of the Place Louis XVI.”
For a more detailed account of this wonderful city, we must refer to the learned and elaborate account, published a few years since, by Mr. Wilkinson. We now have space only for impressions.
“That ancient city, celebrated by the first of poets and historians that are now extant: ‘that venerable city,’ as Pococke so plaintively expresses it, ‘the date of whose ruin is older than the foundation of most other cities,’ offers, at this day, a picture of desolation and fallen splendour, more complete than can be found elsewhere; and yet ‘such vast and surprising remains,’ to continue in the words of the same old traveller, ‘are still to be seen, of such magnificence and solidity, as may convince any one that beholds them, that without some extraordinary accident, they must have lasted for ever, which seems to have been the intention of the founders of them.’”
“Their very aspect,” says Savary, “would awaken the genius of a polished nation; but the Turks and Copts, crushed to dust beneath an iron sceptre, behold them without astonishment, and build huts, which even scarcely screen them from the sun, in their neighbourhood. These barbarians, if they want a mill-stone, do not blush to overturn a column, the support of a temple or portico, and saw it in pieces! Thus abject does despotism render men.”—“All here is sublime, all majestic. The kings seem to have acquired the glory of never dying while the obelisks and colossal statues exist; and have only laboured for immortality. They could preserve their memory against the efforts of time, but not against the efforts of the barbarism of conquerors; those dreadful scourges of science and nations, which, in their pride, they have too often erased from the face of the earth.”—“With pain one tears oneself from Thebes. Her monuments fix the traveller’s eyes, and fill his mind with vast ideas. Beholding colossal figures, and stately obelisks, which seem to surpass human powers, he says,—‘Man has done this,’ and feels himself and his species ennobled. True it is, when he looks down on the wretched huts, standing beside these magnificent labours, and when he perceives an ignorant people, instead of a scientific nation, he grieves for the generations that are past, and the arts that have perished with them; yet this very grief has a kind of charm for a heart of sensibility.”
“It would be difficult,” says Sonnini, “to describe the sensations which the sight of objects so grand, so majestic, raised within me. It was not a simple adoration merely, but an ecstacy which suspended the use of all my faculties. I remained some time immoveable with rapture, and I felt inclined more than once to prostrate myself in token of veneration before monuments, the rearing of which appeared to transcend the strength and genius of man.”
“Let the so much boasted fabrics of Greece and Rome (continues he) come and bow down before the temples and palaces of Thebes and Egypt. Its lofty ruins are still more striking than their gaudy ornaments; its gigantic wrecks are more majestic than their perfect preservation. The glory of the most celebrated fabrics vanishes before the prodigies of Egyptian architecture; and to describe them justly, a man must possess the genius of those who conceived and executed them, or the eloquent pen of a Bossuet.”
“On turning,” says Denon, “the point of a chain of mountains, we saw, all at once, ancient Thebes in its full extent—that Thebes whose magnitude has been pictured to us by a single word in Homer, hundred-gated—renowned for numerous kings, who, through their wisdom, have been elevated to the rank of gods; for laws which have been revered without being known; for sciences which have been confided to proud and mysterious inscriptions; wise and earliest monuments of the arts which time has respected; this sanctuary, abandoned, isolated through barbarism, and surrendered to the desert from which it was won; this city, shrouded in the veil of mystery, by which even colossi are magnified; this remote city, which imagination has only caught a glimpse of through the darkness of time, was still so gigantic an apparition, that, at the sight of its ruins, the French army halted of its own accord, and the soldiers, with one spontaneous movement, clapped their hands.”
Dr. Richardson, who visited Thebes many years after Denon, tells us, that as he approached it in the night, he could not judge of the awful grandeur of that first appearance, which so powerfully affected the enthusiastic Frenchman. “But the next morning’s sun convinced us,” he says, “that the ruins can scarcely be seen from the river; that no where does the traveller turn the corner of the mountain to come in sight of them; and that he must be near them, or among them, before he can discover any thing.” Yet both Denon’s drawings, and the more recent ones of Captain W. F. Head, give some distant views of the ruins, which are very effective.
Mons. Champollion speaks of Thebes in terms of equal admiration:—“All that I had seen, all that I had learned on the left bank, appeared miserable in comparison with the gigantic conceptions by which I was surrounded at Karnac. I shall take care not to attempt to describe any thing; for either my description would not express the thousandth part of what ought to be said, or if I drew a faint sketch, I should be taken for an enthusiast, or, perhaps, for a madman. It will suffice to add, that no people, either ancient or modern, ever conceived the art of architecture on so sublime, and so grand, a scale, as the ancient Egyptians. Their conceptions were those of men a hundred feet high.”
Mr. Carne speaks to the same effect:—“It is difficult to describe the noble and stupendous ruins of Thebes. Beyond all others, they give you the idea of a ruined, yet imperishable, city: so vast is their extent, that you wander a long time, confused and perplexed, and discover at every step some new object of interest.”