DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.4393#0126
108 A THOUSAND Ml LBS UP TUB NIL B.
cornice, or pictured legend enriched those walls, we were
too far off to distinguish them. All looked strangely
naked and solemn—more like a tomb than a temple.
Nor was the surrounding scene less deathlike in its solitude.
Not a tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green
monotony of the plain. Behind the temple, but divided
from it by a farther space of mounded ruins, rose the
mountains—pinky, aerial, with sheeny sand-drifts heaped
in the hollows of their bare buttresses and spaces of soft
blue shadow in their misty chasms. Where the range
receded, a long vista of glittering desert opened to the
Libyan horizon.
Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised
causeway which apparently connected the mounds with
some point down by the river, the details of the temple
gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now see
the curve and under shadow of the cornice; and a small
object in front of the facade, which looked at first sight
like a monolithic altar, resolved itself into a massive gate-
way, of the kind known as a single pylon. Nearer still,
among some low outlying mounds, we came upon frag-
ments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half-
buried in rank grass—upon a series of stagnant niter-tanks
and deserted workshops — upon the telegraph poles and
wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert
and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the
Soudan.
Egypt is the land of niter. It is found wherever a crude
brick mound is disturbed or an antique stone structure de-
molished. The Nile mud is strongly impregnated with it;
and in Nubia we used to find it lying in thick talc-like
flakes upon the surface of rocks far above the present level
of the inundation. These tanks at Denderah had been
sunk, we aro'told, when the great temple was excavated by
Abbas Pasha more than twenty years ago. The niter then
found was utilized out of hand; washed and crystallized in
the tanks; and converted into gunpowder in the adjacent
workshops. The telegraph wires are more recent intruders,
and the work of the khedive; but one longed to put them
out of sight, to pull down the gunpowder sheds, and to
fill up the tanks with debris. For what had the arts of
modern warfare or the wonders of modern science to do
with Ilathor, the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades,
cornice, or pictured legend enriched those walls, we were
too far off to distinguish them. All looked strangely
naked and solemn—more like a tomb than a temple.
Nor was the surrounding scene less deathlike in its solitude.
Not a tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green
monotony of the plain. Behind the temple, but divided
from it by a farther space of mounded ruins, rose the
mountains—pinky, aerial, with sheeny sand-drifts heaped
in the hollows of their bare buttresses and spaces of soft
blue shadow in their misty chasms. Where the range
receded, a long vista of glittering desert opened to the
Libyan horizon.
Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised
causeway which apparently connected the mounds with
some point down by the river, the details of the temple
gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now see
the curve and under shadow of the cornice; and a small
object in front of the facade, which looked at first sight
like a monolithic altar, resolved itself into a massive gate-
way, of the kind known as a single pylon. Nearer still,
among some low outlying mounds, we came upon frag-
ments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half-
buried in rank grass—upon a series of stagnant niter-tanks
and deserted workshops — upon the telegraph poles and
wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert
and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the
Soudan.
Egypt is the land of niter. It is found wherever a crude
brick mound is disturbed or an antique stone structure de-
molished. The Nile mud is strongly impregnated with it;
and in Nubia we used to find it lying in thick talc-like
flakes upon the surface of rocks far above the present level
of the inundation. These tanks at Denderah had been
sunk, we aro'told, when the great temple was excavated by
Abbas Pasha more than twenty years ago. The niter then
found was utilized out of hand; washed and crystallized in
the tanks; and converted into gunpowder in the adjacent
workshops. The telegraph wires are more recent intruders,
and the work of the khedive; but one longed to put them
out of sight, to pull down the gunpowder sheds, and to
fill up the tanks with debris. For what had the arts of
modern warfare or the wonders of modern science to do
with Ilathor, the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades,