I went first to "Pharaoh's Bed."
Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as
exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the
Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the
entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf
complexion--one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian
women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the
flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady
which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the
color of her face--from the throat upward to just beneath the nose--from
the warm white to a mottled, greyish hue. Imagine the line that would
seem to be traced between the two complexions--the mottled grey
below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have
"Pharaoh's Bed" and the temple of Philae as they are to-day.
XVII
"PHARAOH'S BED"
"Pharaoh's Bed," which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern
side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full
of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can "carry off," as it were,
a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It is, on
the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect thing,
in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular
loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so much a spell
woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity.
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