The stone glows with the sun, seems
almost to have a soul glowing with the sense, the sun-ray sense, of
freedom. The heart leaps up in the Ramesseum, not frivolously, but with
a strange, sudden knowledge of the depths of passionate joy there are
in life and in bountiful, glorious nature. Instead of the strength of
a prison one feels the ecstasy of space; instead of the safety of
inclosure, the rapture of naked publicity. But the public to whom this
place of the great king is consigned is a public of Theban hills; of
the sunbeams striking from them over the wide world toward the east;
of light airs, of drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of
butterflies with pure white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab
horse, mounted in the heart of an oasis, to the verge of the great
desert, you will remember the bound, thrilling with fiery animation,
which he gives when he sets his feet on the sand beyond the last
tall date-palms. A bound like that the soul gives when you sit in
the Ramesseum, and see the crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of
palm-trees, and the drowsy mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond
the Nile. And you look up, perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a
lotus column near you, relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man
singing.
A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god of this place, whoever
he be, whether only some humble, happy slave, or the "superintendent of
song and of the recreation of the king.
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