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Updated: May 29, 2025
Under the gleaming moon, the exquisite temple of Philae perched on its high rock above the river, the fires on the shore, the masts of the dahabiehs twinkling with lights, and the barbarous songs floating across the water, gave the feeling of past centuries to the scene.
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 there is one chamber that is simply a place of magic the hall of the flowers. It is this chamber which always makes me think of Philae as a lovely temple of dreams, this silent, retired chamber, where some fabled princess might well have been touched to a long, long sleep of enchantment, and lain for years upon years among the magical flowers the lotus, and the palm, and the papyrus.
It was Torpenhow who but the tale of their adventures, together and apart, from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill many books.
I confess my own preference is for adhering to the English tradition of the ligature, not only in English words, but even in Latin or Greek names quoted in an English context. If we write ae, oe in Philae, Adelphoe, we need the diæresis in Aglaë, Pholoë, and a name like Aeaea looks very funny in an English context.
Steel girders have been fixed across the island from quay to quay, and these have been surrounded by cement masonry, made water-tight by forcing in cement grout. Pharaoh's Bed and the colonnade have been firmly underpinned in cement masonry, and there is little doubt that the actual stability of Philae is now more certain than that of any other temple in Egypt.
For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of Isis?
He did not want Miss Hassett-Bean and Mrs. Harlow to be saying: "Look, my dear, at the tragic, private farewell Antoun Effendi and our American Beauty are having!" Since Philae, there would have been no use in trying to conceal his feelings for Monny from Brigit or me. Therefore we made useful chaperons, and could be regarded as dummies.
And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about her, and make their plaint with hers their plaint for the peace that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the "Holy Island." I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae.
Even now one can forget in Philae forget, after a while, and in certain parts of its buildings, the presence of the grey disease; forget the threatening of the altruists, who desire to benefit humanity by clearing as much beauty out of humanity's abiding-place as possible; forget the fact of the railway, except when the shriek of the engine floats over the water to one's ears; forget economic problems, and the destruction that their solving brings upon the silent world of things whose "use," denied, unrecognized, or laughed at, to man is in their holy beauty, whose mission lies not upon the broad highways where tramps the hungry body, but upon the secret, shadowy byways where glides the hungry soul.
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