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Wallis Budge says in his book on the antiquities of Egypt: "It would be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepsu, if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari." By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten.
And much of its great attraction comes rather from its position, and from them, than essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, what the long shell contains its happy murmur of life is more fascinating than the shell. There, instead of being uplifted or overawed by form, we are rejoiced by color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the story that color and movement tell.
He had his horses, his hawks, his hunting cheetahs, his dogs; one great treasure which he prized and one little conceit. The treasure had been found in the ruins of the Temple Deir-el-Bahari. An ornament of gold set with precious stones. Its shape was that of the Hawk, which had stood as the symbol of the North in the glorious days of Ancient Egypt.
Since the time of the Ptolemies, it had been called Diospolis, and Ptolemais had taken its place as capital of the Thebaid. Already in Strabo's time it was split up. It formed on either side of the Nile groups of gigantic temples and palaces, monuments, and royal graves similar to those scattered to-day amongst Luxor, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, Deir-el-Bahari, and Kurna.
A radiant queen reigns here a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar.
The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famous Vache of Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur Naville as lately as 1905. It stands in the museum at Cairo, but for ever it will be connected in the minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and the Colonnades of Thebes. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentu-Hotep III., in a chapel of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor was found.
Wonderfully expressive and solemnly refined is the cow's face, which is of dark color, like the color of almost black earth earth fertilized by the Nile. This is one of the most beautiful statues in the world. When I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought of it and wished that it still stood there near the Colonnades of Thebes under the tiger-colored precipices. And then I thought of Hatshepsu.
The place of concealment was situated at a turn of a cliff southwest of the village of Deîr-el-Baharî. The explorers managed successfully to identify King Raskamen of the seventeenth dynasty, King Ahmosis I., founder of the eighteenth dynasty, and his queen Ahmo-sis-Nofrîtari, also Queen Arhotep and Princess Set Amnion, and the king's daughters, and his son Prince Sa Amnion.
He is sad, perhaps, as I was with Denderah; dreams in the sun with Abydos; muses with Luxor beneath the little tapering minaret whence the call to prayer drops down to be answered by the angelus bell; falls into a reverie in the "thinking place" of Rameses II., near to the giant that was once the mightiest of all Egyptian statues; eagerly wakes to the fascination of record at Deir-el-Bahari; worships in Edfu; by Philae is carried into a realm of delicate magic, where engineers are not.
And, like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, she rules at Deir-el-Bahari.
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