XLIII.

KARNAK.

KARNAK antedates coherent history, yet it was older the day we saw it than ever before. All thought and poetry, inspired by its antiquity, had richer reason that day than when they were recorded, and so you, meditative reader, will have the advantage of this chapter, when you stand in Karnak. Older than history, yet fresh, as if just ruined for the romantic.

The stones of the fallen walls are as sharplyedged as the hammer left them. They lie in huge heaps, or separately standing in the sand; and, regarding the freshness, you would say that Cambyses and his Persians had marched upon Memphis only last week, while the adherents of the earthquake theory of Egyptian ruin, might fancy they yet felt the dying throes of the convulsion that had shattered these walls.

This freshness is startling. It is sublime. Embalming these temples in her amber air, has not nature so hinted the preservation of their builders'

bodies?

Was the world so enamored of its eldest born, that it could not suffer even the forms of his races and their works to decay? And, O mild-eyed Isis! how beautiful are the balances of nature! In climates where damp and frost crack and corrode, she cherishes with fair adorning the briefer decay. Italy had greenly graced Karnak with foliage. Vines had there clustered and clambered caressingly around these columns, in graceful tendrils wreathing away into the blue air its massive grace. Flowery grass had carpeted the courts, and close-clinging moss shed a bloom along the walls to the distant eye of hope or memory.

Haply it had been dearer so to the painter and the poet. But this death that does not decay, is awful On the edge of the desert, fronting the level green that spreads velvet before it to the river, Karnak scorns time, earthquakes, Cambyses, and Lathyrus, yes, and scorns, also, romantic disappointment. For it is not the most interesting or pleasing of Egyptian remains. It is austere and terrible, and sure to disappoint the romance that seeks in ruins, bowers of sentiment. Let the Misses Verde remember that, when they consider the propriety of visiting Karnak. Peradventure, also, they will there discover hieroglyphs more inexplicable than those of Theban tombs.

When Thebes was Thebes, an avenue of ramheaded sphinxes connected Karnak with Luxor. Imagination indulges visions of Ramses the Great, superb Sesostris, or the philosophical Ptolemies, going in state along this avenue, passing from glory to glory-possibly a statelier spectacle than the royal going to open parliament. Brightly that picture would have illuminated these pages. But reality, our coldest critic, requires cooler coloring from us.

It was a bright February morning that we donkeyed placidly from ruined Luxor to ruined Thebes. The Pacha bestrode a beast that did honor to the spirit of his species. But my brute, although large and comely, seemed only a stuffed specimen of a donkey. Stiffness and clumsiness were his points. A very gad-fly of a donkey-boy, his head somewhere about my donkey's knees, piloted our way and filled our sails—namely, battered the animals' backs. But vainly with a sharpened stick he stung my insensible beast. Only a miserable, perpendicular motion ensued, a very little of which had rendered beneficent Halsted superfluous to a dyspeptic world.

Yet somehow we shambled up the sand from the boat, and, passing through the bazaar of Luxor, entered upon the plain. A dusty donkey-path, through clumps of hilfeh grass and sand patches, is

all that remains of that Sphinx avenue.

We scented sphinxes all the way, a mile and a half, but unearthed no quarry until within a few rods of the pylon. Nero told me afterward, that we had missed the sphinx avenue, which I believed, for Nerc was veracious and my friend. But generally, the Howadji must reject all such stories. Not only in Egypt, but wherever you wander, if some owl has peered into a hole that you passed by, and he discovers the oversight, you are apprised that you had done better not to come at all, rather than miss the dark hole. But we passed along a range of headless, ruined sphinxes, that were ram-headed once, and reached the southern pylon. It stands alone— a simple, sculptured gateway. Behind it, is a small temple of Ptolemaic days, partly, but yet a portion of the great temple, and we climb its roof to survey the waste of Karnak.

The vague disappointment was natural, it was inevitable. It was that of entering St. Peter's and finding that you can see the end. Things so famous pass into ideal proportions. "In heaven, another heaven," sings Schiller, of St. Peter's dome. But if Schiller had looked from Monte Mario upon Rome! It is a disappointment quite distinct from the real character of the object, whose greatness presently compels you to realize how great it is

It is simply the sudden contact of the real with the ideal.

For who ever saw the Coliseum or the Apollo ? And when deep in the mountainous heart of Sicily, the Howadji saw, green and gentle, the vale of Enna-did he see the garden whence Pluto plucked his fairest flower? A Coliseum and an Apollo, enough have seen. But the impossible grandeur and grace of the anticipation are the glow of the ideal the outline of angels alone. All the vagueness and vastness of Egyptian musing in our minds invest Karnak with their own illimitability, and gather around it as the type and complete embodiment of that idea. We go forth to behold the tower of Babel, and in ruins, it must yet pierce the heavens.

Ah! insatiable soul, Mont Blanc was not lofty enough, nor the Venus fair, yet you had hopes of Karnak! Try Baalbec now, and Dhawnlegiri, skyscaling peak of the Himalaya.

Karnak was an aggregation of temples. Orsitasen's cartouche is found there, the first monarch that is distinctly visible in Egyptian history, and Cleopatra's—the last of the long, long line. Every monarch added a pylon, a court, or a colonnade, ambitious each to link his name with the magnificence that must outlive them all, and so leave the car