You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets you in, and wants to follow you in. Prevent him if you can. Pay him. Go in alone. For this is the tomb of Amenhotep II.; and he himself is here, far down, at rest under the mountain, this king who lived and reigned more than fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. The ravine-valley leads to him, and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart of the living rock, in the dull heat of the earth’s bowels, which is like no other heat. You descend by stairs and corridors, you pass over a well by a bridge, you pass through a naked chamber; and the king is not there. And you go on down another staircase, and along another corridor, and you come into a pillared chamber, with paintings on its walls, and on its pillars, paintings of the king in the presence of the gods of the underworld, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain in whose breast you have all this time been walking, there is a crypt. And you turn away from the bright paintings, and down there you see the king.
Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the Royal Academy at Burlington House. I went in the afternoon, when the galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers, gossips, quidnuncs, and flaneurs; with authors, fashionable lawyers, and doctors; with men and women of the world; with young dandies and actresses en vogue. A roar of voices went up to the roof. Every one was talking, smiling, laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a little picture of the very worldly world that loves the things of to-day and the chime of the passing hours. And suddenly some people near me were silent, and some turned their heads to stare with a strangely fixed attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking slowly on legs like sticks. It was clad in black, with a gleam of color. Above it was a face so intensely thin that it was like the face of death. And in this face shone two eyes that seemed full of—the other world. And, like a breath from the other world passing, this man went by me and was hidden from me by the throng. It was Cardinal Manning in the last days of his life.
The face of the king is like his, but it has an even deeper pathos as it looks upward to the rock. And the king’s silence bids you be silent, and his immobility bids you be still. And his sad, and unutterable resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is sifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. And you feel the touch of time, but the touch of eternity, too. And as, in that rock-hewn sanctuary, you whisper “Pax vobiscum,” you say it for all the world.
XIV
EDFU
Prayer pervades the East. Far off across the sands, when one is traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising toward the sky. A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to Allah. And where there are no minarets—in the great wastes of the dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken even by any lonely, wandering bird—the camels are stopped at the appointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are laid down, the brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. And the rich man spreads his carpet, and prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads nothing; but he prays, too. The East is full of lust and full of money-getting, and full of bartering, and full of violence; but it is full of worship—of worship that disdains concealment, that recks not of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do not pray. They do not laugh at the man who does, like the unpraying Christian. There is nothing ludicrous to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays in the stern of your dahabiyeh; and your Egyptian boatman prays by the rudder of your boat; and your black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock in the sand; and your camel-man prays when you are resting in the noontide, watching the far-off quivering mirage, lost in some wayward dream.
And must you not pray, too, when you enter certain temples where once strange gods were worshipped in whom no man now believes?
There is one temple on the Nile which seems to embrace in its arms all the worship of the past; to be full of prayers and solemn praises; to be the holder, the noble keeper, of the sacred longings, of the unearthly desires and aspirations, of the dead. It is the temple of Edfu. From all the other temples it stands apart. It is the temple of inward flame, of the secret soul of man; of that mystery within us that is exquisitely sensitive, and exquisitely alive; that has longings it cannot tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, and loves it can only love.
To Horus it was dedicated—hawk-headed Horus—the son of Isis and Osiris, who was crowned with many crowns, who was the young Apollo of the old Egyptian world. But though I know this, I am never able to associate Edfu with Horus, that child wearing the side-lock—when he is not hawk-headed in his solar aspect—that boy with his finger in his mouth, that youth who fought against Set, murderer of his father.