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Updated: June 20, 2025
"During the weeks of inundation each year," said Mahmoud, after he had told us the dimensions of the statues and the mythical stories associated with them, "these grain fields as far as the vegetation extends are covered with water to a depth of from ten to fifteen feet. When the Nile is at its height the heads of the great Colossi, surrounded by water, rise forty feet above the flood."
Its height was nearly sixty feet, the fingers three feet long, and its weight has been estimated at one thousand tons." The Colossi of Memnon, the two enormous seated figures in the midst of level cultivated fields, were passed and photographed as we returned to Luxor. Their hugeness may be judged by comparing their size with the height of the tourists alongside in the illustration.
Besides, were eight hundred musicians too many to precede the Pharaoh, beloved of Ammon Ra, represented by colossi of basalt and granite sixty cubits high, whose name was written on the cartouches of imperishable monuments, and whose story was carved and painted upon the walls of the hypostyle halls, on the sides of pillars, in endless bassi-relievi and innumerable frescoes?
An avenue bordered by very high columns, of which the capitals are in the form of the full-blown flowers of the papyrus, leads me to a place shut in and almost terrible, where is massed an assembly of colossi. Two, who, if they were standing, would be quite ten yards in height, are seated on thrones on either side of the entrance.
We discovered our feed in a narrow "stringer" a few miles on. That night, we, pigmies, slept in the setting before which should have stridden the colossi of another age. Perhaps eventually, in spite of its magnificence and wonder, we were a little glad to leave the Giant Forest.
Leaving aside all consideration of the artistic merits of other Egyptian colossi, those at Memphis, Thebes, Karnac and Luxor, with the twin marvels of Amenophis-Memnon we turn to the most famous colossus of antiquity, that at Rhodes, only to find that we have even less evidence on which to base an opinion as to its quality than is available in the case of the numerous primitive works of Egypt and of India.
You must have understood life, you must have suffered; the world was crumbling to pieces about you; you wept on its ruins and you despaired; your mistresses were false; your friends calumniated, your compatriots misunderstood; your heart was empty; death was in your eyes, and you were the Colossi of grief.
But in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions, he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past. Pilgrim rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the colossi of the desert.
Tourists who came to visit the Colossi of Memnon, whose song to the dawn never dies, or to "do" the ruins of the Hundred-Gated city of Thebes, came much earlier in the day. While the boat was drifting slowly across, Michael's eyes rested lovingly on his surroundings. If the girl was appreciative of Nile scenery, how greatly it must be impressing her!
Often and often have I left the Loulia very early moored against the long sand islet that faces Luxor when the Nile has not subsided, I have rowed across the quiet water that divided me from the western bank, and, with a happy heart, I have entered into the lovely peace of the great spaces that stretch from the Colossi of Memnon to the Nile, to the mountains, southward toward Armant, northward to Kerekten, to Danfik, to Gueziret-Meteira.
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