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Can you imagine me writing love-letters to a woman in the moon? Can I send American Beauty roses to the ruins of Karnak? Here I can telephone you; not that I ever have anything to say that you want to hear, but because I want to listen to your voice, and to have you ask, 'Oh! is that you? as though you were glad it was me. But Egypt! Can I call up Egypt on the long-distance?
No visitor stands breathless as in the great hall of Karnak or in the once dreadful Coliseum at Rome, or dreams with sensuous delight as before the Jasmine Court at Agra. "The weirdness of the scene possesses us as a haunted chamber might. We have before us the narrow lanes, paved with tufa, in which Roman wagon wheels have worn deep ruts.
Homer's hundred-gated Thebes, which was for so long the capital of Egypt, offers at Karnak and Luxor the finest remains of temples; what is left of the former evidently showing that it must have been one of the most magnificent buildings ever erected in any country.
Clair and I had been pretty near each other in our classes, though once or twice lately I had got an advantage over her; but we had kept on terms of cool social distance until now. Now the spirit of rivalry was awake. I think it began to stir at my Paris dresses and things; Karnak and Mme. Ricard finished the mischief.
Toward Karnak many of them are yet to be seen in a badly mutilated condition, but there is another avenue containing forty of these figures in a good state of preservation. The first of the Karnak temples reached is one dedicated to the Theban moon god, Khons, reared by Rameses III. The Temple of Ammon, called "the throne of the world," lies a little beyond.
He had already established zoological and botanical gardens in Thebes, and the strange animals and plants which his campaigns furnished for them were depicted on the walls of one of the chambers in the temple he built at Karnak. Before his return to Egypt he received the tribute of "the king of Sangar," or Shinar, in Mesopotamia, and "of the land of Khata the greater."
They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest artificial mound in Europe. They left the car by the roadside and clambered to the top and were very learned and inconclusive about the exact purpose of this vast heap of chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before the temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.
The capital of the column of Taharka at Karnak contains three courses, each about 48 inches high. The last and most projecting course is made up of twenty-six convergent stones, which are held in place by merely the weight of the abacus. The same carelessness which we have already noted in the workmanship of the walls is found in the workmanship of the columns.
After the death of Hatshopsitu, the young Pharaoh set out with his army. It was at the beginning of the twenty-fourth year of his reign that he reached Gaza. Marching forward he reached the spurs of Mount Carmel and won a decisive victory at Megiddo over the allied Syrian princes. The inscriptions at Karnak contain long lists of the titles of the king's Syrian subjects.
The "proto-Doric" column continued in favor under the New Empire, though apparently not later; we find it, for example, in some of the outlying buildings at Karnak. Then there was the column whose capital was adorned with four heads in relief of the goddess Hathor, not to speak of other varieties. Whatever the precise form of the support, it was always used to carry a horizontal beam.