When we love anything, we love to be able to say of the object of our devotion, “There is nothing like it.” Now, in all Egypt, and I suppose in all the world, there is nothing just like Philæ. There are temples, yes; but where else is there a bouquet of gracious buildings such as these gathered in such a holder as this tiny, raft-like isle? And where else are just such delicate and, as I have said, light and almost feminine elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe sterility? Once, beyond Philæ, the Great Cataract roared down from the wastes of Nubia into the green fertility of Upper Egypt. It roars no longer. But still the masses of the rocks, and still the amber and the yellow sands, and still the iron-colored hills, keep guard round Philæ. And still, despite the vulgar desecration that has turned Shellal into a workmen’s suburb and dowered it with a railway-station, there is mystery in Philæ, and the sense of isolation that only an island gives. Even now one can forget in Philæ—forget, after a while, and in certain parts of its buildings, the presence of the gray disease; forget the threatening of the altruists, who desire to benefit humanity by clearing as much beauty out of humanity’s abiding-place as possible; forget the fact of the railway, except when the shriek of the engine floats over the water to one’s ears; forget economic problems, and the destruction that their solving brings upon the silent world of things whose “use,” denied, unrecognized, or laughed at, to man is in their holy beauty, whose mission lies not upon the broad highways where tramps the hungry body, but upon the secret, shadowy byways where glides the hungry soul.
Yes, one can forget even now in the hall of the
From a photograph by James S. Lee
IN “PHARAOH’S BED,” ISLAND OF PHILÆ
temple of Isis, where the capricious graces of form are linked with the capricious graces of color, where, like old and delicious music in the golden strings of a harp, dwells a something—what is it? A murmur, or a perfume, or a breathing?—of old and vanished years when forsakened gods were worshiped. And one can forget in the chapel of Hathor, on whose wall little Horus is born, and in the gray hounds’ chapel beside it. One can forget, for one walks in beauty.