Seated, the one beside the other, facing the Nile and the home of the rising sun, their immense aspect of patience suggests will, calmly, steadily exercised, suggests choice; that, for some reason, as yet unknown, they chose to come to this plain, that they choose solemnly to remain there, waiting, while the harvests grow and are gathered about their feet, while the Nile rises and subsides, while the years and the generations come, like the harvests, and are stored away in the granaries of the past. Their calm broods over this plain, gives to it a personal atmosphere which sets it quite apart from every other flat space of the world. There is no place that I know on the earth which has the peculiar, bright, ineffable calm of the plain of these Colossi. It takes you into its breast, and you lie there in the growing sunshine almost as if you were a child laid in the lap of one of them. That legend of the singing at dawn of the "vocal Memnon," how could it have arisen? How could such calmness sing, such patience ever find a voice? Unlike the Sphinx, which becomes ever more impressive as you draw near to it, and is most impressive when you sit almost at its feet, the Colossi lose in personality as you approach them and can see how they have been defaced.
From afar one feels their minds, their strange, unearthly temperaments commanding this pastoral. When you are beside them, this feeling disappears. Their features are gone, and though in their attitudes there is power, and there is something that awakens awe, they are more wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. They gain in grandeur from the night in strangeness from the moonrise, perhaps specially when the Nile comes to their feet. More than three thousand years old, they look less eternal than the Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is waiting, but with a greater purpose. The Sphinx reduces man really to nothingness. The Colossi leave him some remnants of individuality. One can conceive of Strabo and AElius Gallus, of Hadrian and Sabina, of others who came over the sunlit land to hear the unearthly song in the dawn, being of some--not much, but still of some--importance here.
Before the Sphinx no one is important. But in the distance of the plain the Colossi shed a real magic of calm and solemn personality, and subtly seem to mingle their spirit with the flat, green world, so wide, so still, so fecund, and so peaceful; with the soft airs that are surely scented with an eternal springtime, and with the light that the morning rains down on wheat and clover, on Indian corn and barley, and on brown men laboring, who, perhaps, from the patience of the Colossi in repose have drawn a patience in labor that has in it something not less sublime.
From the Colossi one goes onward toward the trees and the mountains, and very soon one comes to the edge of that strange and fascinating strip of barren land which is strewn with temples and honeycombed with tombs. The sun burns down on it. The heat seems thrown back upon it by the wall of tawny mountains that bounds it on the west. It is dusty, it is arid; it is haunted by swarms of flies, by the guardians of the ruins, and by men and boys trying to sell enormous scarabs and necklaces and amulets, made yesterday, and the day before, in the manufactory of Kurna. From many points it looks not unlike a strangely prolonged rubbish-heap in which busy giants have been digging with huge spades, ****** mounds and pits, caverns and trenches, piling up here a monstrous heap of stones, casting down there a mighty statue.
But how it fascinates! Of curse one knows what it means. One knows that on this strip of land Naville dug out at Deir-el-Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and discovered later, in her shrine, Hathor, the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants streaming from her sacred forehead to her feet; that long before him Mariette here brought to the light at Drah-abu'l-Neggah the treasures of kings of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties; that at the foot of those tiger-colored precipices Theodore M. Davis the American found the sepulcher of Queen Hatshepsu, the Queen Elizabeth of the old Egyptian world, and, later, the tomb of Yuaa and Thuaa, the parents of Queen Thiy, containing mummy-cases covered with gold, jars of oil and wine, gold, silver, and alabaster boxes, a bed decorated with gilded ivory a chair with gilded plaster reliefs, chairs of state, and a chariot; that here Maspero, Victor Loret, Brugsch Bey, and other patient workers gave to the world tombs that had been hidden and unknown for centuries; that there to the north is the temple of Kurna, and over there the Ramesseum; that those rows of little pillars close under the mountain, and looking strangely modern, are the pillars of Hatshepsu's temple, which bears upon its walls the pictures of the expedition to the historic land of Punt; that the kings were buried there, and there the queens and the princes of the vanished dynasties; that beyond to the west is the temple of Deir-el-Medinet with its judgment of the dead; that here by the native village is Medinet-Abu. One knows that, and so the imagination is awake, ready to paint the lily and to gild the beaten gold. But even if one did not know, I think one would be fascinated.
This turmoil of sun-baked earth and rock, grey, yellow, pink, orange, and red, awakens the curiosity, summons the love of the strange, suggests that it holds secrets to charm the souls of men.
