hough tiny, veteran there comes a
perpetual sound of birds. The birds in Egypt have no reverence for age.
Never have I seen them more restless, more gay, or more impertinent,
than in the immemorial ruins of the ancient land. Beyond is an enormous
portal, on the lofty ceiling of which still linger traces of faded
red and blue, which gives access to a great hall with rows of mighty
columns, those on the left hand round, those on the right square, and
almost terribly massive. There is in these no grace, as in the giant
lotus columns of Karnak. Prodigious, heavy, barbaric, they are like a
hymn in stone to Strength. There is something brutal in their aspect,
which again makes one think of war, of assaults repelled, hordes beaten
back like waves by a sea-wall. And still another great hall, with more
gigantic columns, lies in the sun beyond, and a doorway through which
seems to stare fiercely the edge of a hard and fiery mountain. Although
one is roofed by the sky, there is something oppressive here; an
imprisoned feeling comes over one. I could never be fond of Medinet-Abu,
as I am fond of Luxor, of parts of Karnak, of the whole of delicious,
poetical Philae. The big pylons, with their great walls sloping
inward, sand-colored, and glowing with very pale yellow in the sun, the
resistant walls, the brutal columns, the huge and almost savage scale
of everything, always remind me of the violence in men, and also--I
scarcely know why--make me think of the North, of sullen Northern
castles by the sea, in places where skies are grey, and the white of
foam and snow is married in angry nights.

And yet in Medinet-Abu there reigns a splendid calm--a calm that
sometimes seems massive, resistant, as the columns and the walls. Peace
is certainly inclosed by the stones that call up thoughts of war, as if,
perhaps, their purpose had been achieved many centuries ago, and
they were quit of enemies for ever. Rameses III. is connected with
Medinet-Abu. He was one of the greatest of the Egyptian kings, and has
been called the "last of the great sovereigns of Egypt." He ruled for
thirty-one years, and when, after a first visit to Medinet-Abu, I looked
into his records, I was interested to find that his conquests and his
wars had "a character essentially defensive." This defensive spirit is
incarnated in the stones of these ruins. One reads in them something of
the soul of this king who lived twelve hundred years before Christ, and
who desired, "i