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All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a sacred necessity of life. Liberty seems to drench the Ramesseum. And all strong souls must exult there. The sun has taken it as a beloved possession. No massy walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battlements rear themselves up against the outer world as at Medinet-Abu. No huge pylons cast down upon the ground their forms in darkness.
At the Ramesseum, Thebes, thousands of ostraka and jar-stoppers found upon the spot prove that the brick-built remains at the back of the temple were the cellars of the local deity. At Philae, Ombos, Daphnae, and most of the frontier towns of the Delta, there were magazines of this description, and many more will doubtless be discovered when made the object of serious exploration.
Ibrahim's soft eyes had become suddenly sharp and bright. "Do you know Mahmoud Baroudi, my lady?" "We met him on the ship coming from Naples." "Very big big as Rameses the Second, the statue of the King hisself what you see before you at the Ramesseum eyes large as mine, and hair over them what goes like that!" He put up his brown hands and suddenly sketched Baroudi's curiously shaped eyebrows.
There is not very much to see, but from there one has a fine view of other temples of the Ramesseum, looking superb, like a grand skeleton; of Medinet-Abu, distant, very pale gold in the morning sunlight; of little Deir-al-Medinet, the pretty child of the Ptolemies, with the heads of the seven Hathors.
The stone glows with the sun, seems almost to have a soul glowing with the sense, the sun-ray sense, of freedom. The heart leaps up in the Ramesseum, not frivolously, but with a strange, sudden knowledge of the depths of passionate joy there are in life and in bountiful, glorious nature.
It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was buried in the Ramesseum, and when first I entered it the "Lay of the Harper" came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing away of glory into the shades of death. But an optimism almost as determined as Emerson's was quickly bred in me there.
Already she had seen the ruins on the western shore of the Nile; she was familiar with Medinat-Habu, with Deir-al-Bahari, with Kurna, with the Ramesseum, with the tombs of the Kings and of the Queens. They had landed at a point that lay to the south of Thebes, and now seemed to be making for Medinat-Habu. "Where are we going, Hamza?" she asked. "Yes," he replied.
It has long since disappeared, having been used as a quarry for thousands of years; but the size of the site, which can still be traced, shows that in actual area the temple covered a space of ground within which Karnak, Luqsor, and the Ramesseum, huge as they all are, could quite well have stood together.
Whereas the temple of Luxor seems to open its arms to life, and the great fascination of the Ramesseum comes partly from its invasion by every traveling air and happy sun-ray, its openness and freedom, Medinet-Abu impresses by its colossal air of secrecy, by its fortress-like seclusion.
The next day gave us another trip to the west of the Nile: not again in the burning desert, but only as far as the Ramesseum, and then to see the Colossi, seated side by side on their green carpet of meadow, looking out past the centuries toward eternity.
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