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Updated: June 23, 2025
Above them would rise the tall masts of coloured cedar-wood, inserted in sinkings chased into the wall, surmounted by the expanded banners of the king, or the heraldic bearings of the temple floating in the breeze. Between the huge propylons opened up the great gateway of the temple, sixty feet high, which led into a vast court, surrounded by columns and open to the sky.
Their eyes wandered, sometimes, over the track of the foam, and in their minds they saw again the water-birds plashing among lotus plants, and heard the ancient Egyptian litanies softly chanted behind the propylons of a temple built by some king two thousand years departed.
Instead of being dwarfed by the enormous masses of the propylons, their height gained by the near comparison. The obelisks in our squares and vast open spaces have their effect destroyed by the buildings being at a distance from them. There is no scale near at hand to assist the eye in estimating the height; consequently they seem much smaller than they really are.
But the barges glided again northward, and Cornelia only occasionally caught some glimpse of a massive temple, under whose huge propylons the priests had chanted their litanies to Pakht or Ptah for two thousand years, or passed some boat gliding with its mourners to the necropolis, there to leave the mummy that was to await the judgment of Osiris.
The walls of the propylons tapered from the base towards the top, and the same thing sometimes occurred in other walls. In almost all cases the stone walls are built of very large blocks, and they show an unrivalled skill in masonry. Roofs. The roofing which remains is executed entirely in stone, but not arched or vaulted.
We stopped to view and kodak one of the huge Propylons or outer gate ways and found there some visitors who had driven to Karnak in modern carriages instead of using the Oriental way of conveyance that we had taken. An avenue of Sphinxes with rams' heads was also stowed away in the kodak to be brought to light at some future time.
In the evenings and early mornings especially, when these oft-repeated shapes stand solemnly round the horizon, cut hard and blue against the sky like the mighty pylons and propylons of Egyptian temples, the architectural character of the scenery and its definite meaning and purpose strike one most inevitably.
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