projecting base. The sky was blinding blue. Great bees hummed, like
bourdons, through the silence, deepening the almost heavy calm. These
columns, architraves, doorways, how mighty, how grandly strong they
were! And yet soon I began to be aware that even here, where surely one
should read only the Book of the Dead, or bend down to the hot ground
to listen if perchance one might hear the dead themselves murmuring over
the chapters of Beatification far down in their hidden tombs, there was
a likeness, a gentle gaiety of life, as in the tomb of Thi. The effect
of solidity was immense. These columns bulged, almost like great fruits
swollen out by their heady strength of blood. They towered up in crowds.
The heavy roof, broken in places most mercifully to show squares and
oblongs of that perfect, calling blue, was like a frowning brow. And yet
I was with grace, with gentleness, with lightness, because in the place
of the dead I was again with the happy, living walls. Above me, on the
roof, there was a gleam of palest blue, like the blue I have sometimes
seen at morning on the Ionian sea just where it meets the shore. The
double rows of gigantic columns stretched away, tall almost as forest
trees, to right of me and to left, and were shut in by massive walls,
strong as the walls of a fortress. And on these columns, and on these
walls, dead painters and gravers had breathed the sweet breath of life.
Here in the sun, for me alone, as it seemed, a population followed their
occupations. Men walked, and kneeled, and stood, some white and clothed,
some nude, some red as the red man's child that leaped beyond the
sea. And here was the lotus-flower held in reverent hands, not the
rose-lotus, but the blossom that typified the rising again of the sun,
and that, worn as an amulet, signified the gift of eternal youth. And
here was hawk-faced Horus, and here a priest offering sacrifice to a
god, belief in whom has long since passed away. A king revealed himself
to me, adoring Ptah, "Father of the beginnings," who established upon
earth, my figures thought, the everlasting justice, and again at the