Читать книгу Egypt and Its Monuments онлайн

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The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the spirits’ eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness. Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down, penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king’s chamber, listen to the silence there, feel it with your hands,—is it not tangible in this hot fastness of incorruptible death?—creep, like the surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished stone, watching the bloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed, though that, of all its qualities, should have been given here, in the land it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the great Pyramid. You know that you can climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from all sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you.