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. Each prompts him to
a different mood, each wakes in his nature a different response. And at
Karnak what is he? What mood enfolds him there? Is he sad, thoughtful,
awed, or gay?

An old lady in a helmet, and other things considered no doubt by her as
suited to Egypt rather than to herself, remarked in my hearing, with
a Scotch accent and an air of summing up, that Karnak was "very nice
indeed." There she was wrong--Scotch and wrong. Karnak is not nice. No
temple that I have seen upon the banks of the Nile is nice. And Karnak
cannot be summed up in a phrase or in many phrases; cannot even be
adequately described in few or many words.

Long ago I saw it lighted up with colored fires one night for the
Khedive, its ravaged magnificence tinted with rose and livid green and
blue, its pylons glittering with artificial gold, its population of
statues, its obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dreams to
things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy specters, and from these
to hard and piercing realities at the cruel will of pigmies crouching
by its walls. Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly by moonlight
after watching the sunset from the summit of the great pylon. That was a
pageant worth more than the Khedive's.

I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often