It was not the solemn
Senmut (he wore a beard, I'm sure) who chose that background, if I know
anything of women.
Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar. My
eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath
the mountains. I had asked: "What do those little pillars mean? And are
those little doors?" I had promised myself to go there, as one promises
oneself a _bonne bouche_ to finish a happy banquet. And I had realized
the subtlety, essentially feminine, that had placed a temple there.
And Menu-Hotep's temple, perhaps you say, was it not there before the
queen's? Then he must have possessed a subtlety purely feminine, or have
been advised by one of his wives in his building operations, or by some
favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man would probably think
that the best way to attract and to fix attention on any object was to
make it much bigger than things near and around it, to set up a giant
among dwarfs.
Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her generation, she set her
long but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is the
result? Simply that whenever one looks toward them one says, "What are
those little pillars?" Or if one is more instructed, one thinks about
Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices are as nothing. A woman's wile has
blotted them out.
And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored precipices.
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