r 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.

The happy dancers and the humble wives, they always come before me with
the temple of Luxor--joy and discretion side by side. And with them, to
my ears, the two voices seem to come, muezzin and angelus bell, mingling
not in war, but peace. When I think of this temple, I think of its joy
and peace far less than of its majesty.

And yet it is majestic. Look at it, as I have often done, toward
sunset from the western bank of the Nile, or climb the mound beyond its
northern end, where stands the grand entrance, and you realize at once
its nobility and solemn splendor. From the _Loulia's_ deck it was a
procession of great columns; that was all. But the decorative effect of
these columns, soaring above the river and its vivid life, is fine.

By day all is turmoil on the river-bank. Barges are unloading, ste