and stringless harp. But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers
in your memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a marvellous
ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the activity of life. Thi must
have loved life; loved prayer and sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved
feasting and gaiety, labor of the hands and of the head, loved the arts,
the music of flute and harp, singing by the lingering and plaintive
voices which seem to express the essence of the east, loved sweet odors,
loved sweet women--do we not see him sitting to receive offerings with
his wife beside him?--loved the clear nights and the radiant days that
in Egypt make glad the heart of man. He must have loved the splendid
gift of life, and used it completely. And so little Ali had very right
to make his sole obeisance at Thi's delicious tomb, from which death
itself seems banished by the soft and embracing radiance of the almost
living walls.

This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy gaiety of life, is often
combined in Egypt, and most beautifully and happily combined, with
tremendous solidity, heavy impressiveness, a hugeness that is well-nigh
tragic; and it supplies a relief to eye, to mind, to soul, that is sweet
and refreshing as the trickle of a tarantella from a reed flute
heard under the shadows of a temple of Hercules. Life showers us with
contrasts. Art, which gives to us a second and a more withdrawn life,
opening to us a door through which we pass to our dreams, may well
imitate life in this.

IV

ABYDOS

Through a long and golden noontide, and on into an afternoon whose
opulence of warmth and light it seemed could never wane, I sat alone,
or wandered gently quite alone, in the Temple of Seti I. at Abydos. Here
again I was in a place of the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the dead in
the sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But here in Abydos I
was accompanied by whiteness. The general effect of Seti's mighty temple
is that it is a white temple when seen in full sunshine and beneath
a sky of blinding blue. In an arid place it stands, just beyond an
Egyptian village that is a maze of dust, of children, of animals, and
flies. The last blind houses of the village, brown as brown paper,
confront it on a mound, and as I came toward it a girl-child swathed
in purple with ear-rings, and a twist of orange handkerchief above her
eyes, full of cloud and fire, leaned from a roof, sinuously as a young
snake, to watch me. On each s