to me a feeling
of the real, the irresistible Africa such as I had not known since I had
been in Egypt; and I thought I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum
of praying and praising voices.

"God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens through which flow
rivulets. They shall be for ever therein, and that is the reward of the
virtuous."

The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I approached the temple
deepened when I drew close to it, when I stood within it. In the first
hall, mighty, magnificent, full of enormous columns from which faces of
Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, I found only one
face almost complete, saved from the fury of fanatics by the protection
of the goddess of chance, in whom the modern Egyptian so implicitly
believes. In shape it was a delicate oval. In the long eyes, about the
brow, the cheeks, there was a strained expression that suggested to me
more than a gravity--almost an anguish--of spirit. As I looked at it, I
thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this the ideal of joy in the time of the
Ptolemies? Joy may be rapturous, or it may be serene; but could it ever
be like this? The pale, delicious blue that here and there, in tiny
sections, broke the almost haggard, greyish whiteness of this first hall
with the roof of black, like bits of an evening sky seen through tiny
window-slits in a sombre room, suggested joy, was joy summed up in
color. But Hathor's face was weariful and sad.

From the gloom of the inner halls came a sound, loud, angry, menacing,
as I walked on, a sound of menace and an odor, heavy and deathlike.
Only in the first hall had those builders and decorators of two thousand
years ago been moved by their conception of the goddess to hail her,
to worship her, with the purity of white, with the sweet gaiety of
turquoise. Or so it seems to-day, when the passion of Christianity
against Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians come to seek
what Christian Copts destroyed; wander through the deserted courts,
desirous of looking upon the faces that have long since been hacked to
pieces. A more benign spirit informs our world, but, alas! Hathor has
been sacrificed to deviltries of old. And it is well, perhaps, that her
temple should be sad, like a place of silent waiting for the glories
that are gone.

With every step my melancholy grew. Encompassed by gloomy odors,
assailed by the clamour of gigantic bats, which flew furiously among the
monstrous pillars