Yet how could
fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of those who were privileged
to worship in such a temple, or even reverently to stand under the
colonnade within the door? As well, perhaps, one might ask how men could
be inspired to raise such a perfect building to a deity with the face of
a hawk? But Horus was not the god of crocodiles, but a god of the sun.
And his power to inspire men must have been vast; for the greatest
concentration in stone in Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole world,
the Sphinx, as De Rouge proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a
representation of Horus transformed to conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and
Edfu! For such marvels we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And if we
forget the hawk, which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of
tombs and temples, and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the
yellow-haired god of the sun, driving "westerly all day in his flaming
chariot," and shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we
can be at peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to
Edfu to-day is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long
as the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon
the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and comes
at last into the sombre wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the deck of
the _Loulia_.
And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like
faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.
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