Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khuns, the king of the gods, his wife, mother of gods, and the moon god, were the Theban triad to whom the holy buildings of Thebes on the two banks of the Nile were dedicated; and this temple of Luxor, the "House of Amun in the Southern Apt," was built fifteen hundred years before Christ by Amenhotep III. Rameses II., that vehement builder, added to it immensely. One walks among his traces when one walks in Luxor. And here, as at Denderah, Christians have let loose the fury that should have had no place in their religion. Churches for their worship they made in different parts of the temple, and when they were not praying, they broke in pieces statues, defaced bas-reliefs, and smashed up shrines with a vigor quite as great as that displayed in preservation by Christians of to-day. Now time has called a truce. Safe are the statues that are left. And day by day two great religions, almost as if in happy brotherly love, send forth their summons by the temple walls. And just beyond those walls, upon the hill, there is a Coptic church. Peace reigns in happy Luxor. The lion lies down with the lamb, and the child, if it will, may harmlessly put its hand into the cockatrice's den.
Perhaps because it is so surrounded, so haunted by life and familiar things, because the pigeons fly about it, the buffalo stares into it, the goats stir up the dust beside its columns, the twittering voices of women make a music near its courts, many people pay little heed to this great temple, gain but a small impression from it. It decorates the bank of the Nile. You can see it from the dahabiyehs. For many that is enough. Yet the temple is a noble one, and, for me, it gains a definite attraction all its own from the busy life about it, the cheerful hum and stir. And if you want fully to realize its dignity, you can always visit it by night. Then the cries from the village are hushed. The houses show no lights. Only the voices from the Nile steal up to the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from which the flags of Thebes once flew on festal days, to the shrine of Alexander the Great, with its vultures and its stars, and to the red granite statues of Rameses and his wives.
These last are as expressive as and of course more definite than my dancers. They are full of character. They seem to breathe out the essence of a vanished domesticity. Colossal are the statues of the king, solid, powerful, and tremendous, boldly facing the world with the calm of one who was thought, and possibly thought himself, to be not much less than a deity. And upon each pedestal, shrinking delicately back, was once a little wife. Some little wives are left.
They are delicious in their modesty. Each stands away from the king, shyly, respectfully. Each is so small as to be below his down- stretched arm. Each, with a surely furtive gesture, reaches out her right hand, and attains the swelling calf of her noble husband's leg.
Plump are their little faces, but not bad-looking. One cannot pity the king. Nor does one pity them. For these were not "Les desenchantees," the restless, sad-hearted women of an Eastern world that knows too much. Their longings surely cannot have been very great. Their world was probably bounded by the calf of Rameses's leg. That was "the far horizon" of the little plump-faced wives.
