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Updated: May 15, 2025
At the head of this avenue, and opposite the public gate, rose two obelisks or slender and lofty granite columns of four sides, on which was inscribed the history of the pharaoh Seti. Beyond the obelisks rose the gate of the temple having at both sides of it gigantic piles in the form of truncated pyramids called pylons.
When she had passed out beyond the pylons enclosing the temple she turned round, shaking her head in a puzzled way as she gazed at it; for she knew that not a stone had been changed within the last hour, and yet it looked as strange in her eyes as some landscape with which we have become familiar in all the beauty of spring, and see once more in winter with its trees bare of leaves; or like the face of a woman which we thought beautiful under the veil which hid it, and which, when the veil is raised, we see to be wrinkled and devoid of charm.
He embraced her, or toyed with her hair, but he looked toward the city, at those immense many-colored pylons of the pharaoh's palace, or at some unknown object. At times he did not even answer her questions, or he looked at her suddenly as if roused from sleep, or as if he wondered that he saw her there beside him.
The statues disposed in the temple near the pylons, and at the sacred lakes accorded in size with all other parts of Karnak. In the immense gate the worthy Herhor, the high priest of that temple, was waiting for Ramses. Surrounded by a whole staff of priests Herhor greeted the pharaoh almost haughtily, and while burning a censer before the sovereign he did not look at him.
Nor could the multitude be blamed for this confidence; for at the Serapeum, the theatre of Dionysus, the lofty pylons of the Sebasteum, the main door of the museum, in front of the entrance of the palace in the Bruchium, and before the fortress-like palaces in the Lochias, triumphal arches had been erected, adorned with gods of victory and trophies hastily constructed of plaster, inscriptions of congratulations and thanks to the deities, garlands of foliage and flowers.
It was illuminated by thousands of lamps; a hundred fires burnt on its Pylons, its battlemented walls and roofs. Burning torches flared between the rows of sphinxes which connected the various gates with the main building, and the now empty house of the god Apis was so surrounded by colored fires that it gleamed like a white limestone rock in a tropical sunset.
When he reached the gateway that opened like a tunnel between the ponderous pylons, he was delayed some minutes waiting till the porter should admit him through the wicket of bronze. At last, a lank youth, the son of the regular keeper, appeared, and, with an inarticulate apology, bade him enter.
Lysias hurried to them through the grove, patted their shining necks with soothing words, and stood looking down at the vast city at his feet, over which hung a film of violet mist at the solemn Pyramids, over which the morning glow flung a gay robe of rose-color on the huge temple of Ptah, with the great colossi in front of its pylons on the Nile, mirroring the glory of the sky, and on the limestone hills behind the villages of Babylon and Troy, about which he had, only yesterday, heard a Jew at the king's table relating a legend current among his countrymen to the effect that these hills had been obliged to give up all their verdure to grace the mounts of the sacred city Hierosolyma.
That had been a world of metal structures, and he believed he could trace a kinship between his memory of those and these pylons. Surely they had no connection with the earlier castle on the cliff. Once more Ashe ducked to reset the probe. And in the fast-fading light they watched a third and last picture.
In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo.
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