d heaved with a divine
breath was still as the breast of a corpse.

And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of Karnak.

Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under many kings, its ruins
are as complex as were probably once its completed temples, with their
shrines, their towers, their courts, their hypo-style halls. As I
looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made more
touching than in day-time, those alluring complexities, brought by the
night and Khuns into a unity that was both tender and superb. Masses of
masonry lay jumbled in shadow and in silver; gigantic walls cast sharply
defined gloom; obelisks pointed significantly to the sky, seeming, as
they always do, to be murmuring a message; huge doorways stood up like
giants unafraid of their loneliness and yet pathetic in it; here was a
watching statue, there one that seemed to sleep, seen from afar. Yonder
Queen Hatshepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el-Bahari, and who is more
familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left there traces, and nearer, to the
right, Rameses III. had made a temple, surely for the birds, so fond
they are of it, so pertinaciously they haunt it. Rameses II., mutilated
and immense, stood on guard before the terrific hall of Seti I.; and
between him and my platform in the air rose the solitary lotus column
that prepares you for the wonder of Seti's hall, which otherwise might
almost overwhelm you--unless you are a Scotch lady in a helmet. And
Khuns had his temple here by the Sphinx of the twelfth Rameses, and
Ptah, who created "the sun egg and the moon egg," and who was said--only
said, alas!--to have established on earth the "everlasting justice," had
his, and still their stones receive the silver moon-rays and wake
the wonder of men. Thothmes III., Thothmes I., Shishak, who smote the
kneeling prisoners and vanquished Jeroboam, Medamut and Mut, Amenhotep
I., and Amenhotep II.--all have left their records or been celebrated at
Karnak. Purposely I mingled them in my mind--did not attempt to put them
in their proper order, or even to disentangle gods and goddesses from
conquerors and kings. In the warm and seductive night Khuns whispered
to me: "As long ago at Bekhten I exorcised the demon from the suffering
Princess, so now I exorcise from these ruins all spirits but my own.
To-night these ruins shall suggest nothing but majesty, tranquillity,
and beauty. Their records are for Ra, and must be studied by his rays.
In mine