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In the warm and seductive night Khuns whispered to me: "As long ago at Bekhten I exorcised the demon from the suffering Princess, so now I exorcise from these ruins all spirits but my own. To-night these ruins shall suggest nothing but majesty, tranquillity, and beauty. Their records are for Ra, and must be studied by his rays.
As I looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made more touching than in day-time, those alluring complexities, brought by the night and Khuns into a unity that was both tender and superb.
Horus would not permit Tum to reign even for a few brief moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of the moon, would be witness of a conflict in that lovely western region of the ocean of the sky where the bark of the sun had floated away beneath the mountain rim upon the red-and-orange tides.
Everything that moved against the afterglow man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse became at once an ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving it, the color in which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched serenely, as if he knew the end. And almost suddenly the miraculous effort failed.
And Khuns had his temple here by the Sphinx of the twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who created "the sun egg and the moon egg," and who was said only said, alas! to have established on earth the "everlasting justice," had his, and still their stones receive the silver moon-rays and wake the wonder of men.
Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khuns, the king of the gods, his wife, mother of gods, and the moon god, were the Theban triad to whom the holy buildings of Thebes on the two banks of the Nile were dedicated; and this temple of Luxor, the "House of Amun in the Southern Apt," was built fifteen hundred years before Christ by Amenhotep III. Rameses II., that vehement builder, added to it immensely.
And presently I went down, and yielding a complete and happy obedience to Khuns, I wandered along through the stupendous vestiges of past eras, dead ambitions, vanished glory, and long-outworn belief, and I ignored eras, ambitions, glory, and belief, and thought only of form, and height, of the miracle of blackness against silver, and of the pathos of statues whose ever-open eyes at night, when one is near them, suggest the working of some evil spell, perpetual watchfulness, combined with eternal inactivity, the unslumbering mind caged in the body that is paralysed.
The breast that had heaved with a divine breath was still as the breast of a corpse. And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of Karnak. Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under many kings, its ruins are as complex as were probably once its completed temples, with their shrines, their towers, their courts, their hypo-style halls.
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