“Yes, ma'am, I just make him.”
The carriage was an arm-chair slung between two pushing-poles; between each end of them was harnessed a surly diminutive donkey who seemed to feel his degradation. Each donkey required a driver; Ahmed, with his sleeves rolled up and armed with a big club, walked beside, to steady the swaying chair, and to beat the boys when their donkeys took a fancy to lie down; and a cloud of interested Arabs hovered about it, running with it, adding to the noise, dust, and picturesqueness of our cavalcade.
On the outskirts of the mud-cabins we pass through the weekly market, a motley assemblage of country-folks and produce, camels, donkeys, and sheep. It is close by the Ghawazee quarter, where is a colony of a hundred or more of these dancing-girls. They are always conspicuous among Egyptian women by their greater comeliness and gay apparel. They wear red and yellow gowns, many tinkling ornaments of silver and gold, and their eyes are heavily darkened with kohl. I don't know what it is in this kohl, that it gives woman such a wicked and dangerous aspect. They come out to ask for backsheesh in a brazen but probably intended to be a seductive manner; they are bold, but some of them rather well-looking. They claim to be an unmixed race of ancient lineage; but I suspect their blood is no purer than their morals. There is not much in Egypt that is not hopelessly mixed.
Of the mile-and-a-half avenue of Sphinxes that once connected Luxor with Karnak, we see no trace until we are near the latter. The country is open and beautiful with green wheat, palms, and sycamores. Great Karnak does not show itself until we are close upon it; its vast extent is hidden by the remains of the wall of circuit, by the exterior temples and pylons. It is not until we have passed beyond the great—but called small—temple of Rameses III., at the north entrance, and climbed the pyramidal tower to the west of the Great Hall, that we begin to comprehend the magnitude of these ruins, and that only days of wandering over them and of study would give us their gigantic plan.
Karnak is not a temple, but a city rather; a city of temples, palaces, obelisks, colossal statues, It is, like a city, a growth of many centuries. It is not a conception or the execution of a purpose; it is the not always harmonious accretion of time and wealth and vanity. Of the slowness of its growth some idea may be gained from the fact that the hieroglyphics on one face of one of its obelisks were cut two hundred and fifty years after those on the opposite face. So long ago were both chiseled, however, they are alike venerable to us. I shouldn't lose my temper with a man who differed with me only a thousand years about the date of any event in Egypt.
They were working at this mass of edifices, sacred or profane, all the way from Osirtasen I. down to Alexander II.; that is from about 3064 B. c. according to Mariette (Bunsen, 2781, Wilkinson, 2080,—it doesn't matter) to only a short time before our era. There was a modest beginning in the plain but chaste temple of Osirtasen; but each king sought to outdo his predecessor until Sethi I. forever distanced rivalry in building the Great Hall. And after him it is useless for anyone else to attempt greatness by piling up stones. The length of the temples, pylons, and obelisks, en suite from west to east, is 1180 feet; but there are other outlying and gigantic ruins; I suppose it is fully a mile and a half round the wall of circuit.
There is nothing in the world of architecture like the Great Hall; nothing so massive, so surprising, and, for me, at least, so crushingly oppressive. What monstrous columns! And how thickly they are crowded together! Their array is always compared to a forest. The comparison is apt in some respects; but how free, uplifting is a forest, how it expands into the blue air, and lifts the soul with it. A piece of architecture is to be judged, I suppose, by the effect it produces. It is not simply that this hall is pagan in its impression; it misses the highest architectural effect by reason of its unrelieved heaviness. It is wonderful; it was a prodigious achievement to build so many big columns.
The setting of enormous columns so close together that you can only see a few of them at one point of view is the architecture of the Great Hall. Upon these, big stones are put for a roof. There is no reason why this might not have been repeated over an acre of ground. Neither from within nor from without can you see the extent of the hall. * The best view of it is down the center aisle, formed by the largest columns; and as these have height as well as bulk, and the sky is now seen above them, the effect is of the highest majesty. This hall was dimly lighted by windows in the clerestory, the frames of which exhibit a freedom of device and grace of carving worthy of a Gothic cathedral. These columns, all richly sculptured, are laid up in blocks of stone of half the diameter, the joints broken. If the Egyptians had dared to use the arch, the principle of which they knew, in this building, so that the columns could have stood wide apart and still upheld the roof, the sight of the interior would have been almost too much for the human mind. The spectator would have been exalted, not crushed by it.
* The Great Hall measures one hundred and seventy feet by
three hundred and twenty-nine; in this space stand one
hundred and thirty-four columns; twelve of these, forming
the central avenue of one hundred and seventy feet, are
sixty-two feet high, without plinth and abacus, and eleven
feet six inches in diameter; the other one hundred and
twenty-two columns are forty-two feet five inches in height
and about nine feet in diameter. The great columns stand
only fifteen or sixteen feet apart.
Not far off is the obelisk which Amunoo-het erected to the memory of her father. I am not sure but it will stand long after The Hall of Sethi is a mass of ruins; for already is the water sapping the foundations of the latter, some of the columns lean like reeling drunken men, and one day, with crash after crash, these giants will totter, and the blocks of stone of which they are built will make another of those shapeless heaps to which sooner or later our solidest works come. The red granite shaft of the faithful daughter lifts itself ninety-two feet into the air, and is the most beautiful as it is the largest obelisk ever raised.