Benson, Margaret; Gourlay, Janet: The temple of Mut in Asher: an account of the excavation of the temple and of the religious representations and objects found therein, as illustrating the history of Egypt and the main religious ideas of the Egyptians (London, 1899)

78

THE TEMPLE OF MUT.

[part ii.

looks down the solemn majesty of the great lion-
headed Sekhet, with her uraeus crown, and the
pleasant face of the Egyptian king whom envy has
robbed of his name.

Looking further up the temple over many low
lines of broken wall on the west side the figures
of the cynocephali still face the rising sun, with
what is left to them of hands still upraised to
greet him. Beyond sit silent and grave the row
of goddesses in the outer corridor; behind them
lies the glittering lake and above a thick grove
of palms rise the broad shoulders of the Theban
Hills.

In the eastern half of the temple the walls are
rather higher and the spaces larger and more open.
The other arm of the lake gleams behind them.
Beyond the tumbled sand-heaps on the further side
the eye rests with pleasure on the deep blue-green
of the corn-land and, in the furthest distance, on the
trinity of peaks, dreamlike and faintly-flushed, of the
Gebel-el-Geir.

Over all the temple, from where the goddess
guardians sit above the steps down which priests
once carried the sacred bark, and where kings
burnt frankincense before the emblem of the god,
to where the sphinx head still smiles out of the
dust of centuries, lies that air of expectation, still
and assured, which so inspires the remains of that
people, who built not for time but for eternity. All
through the land the spirit of the race prisoned in