Isis nursing Horus gave way to the Virgin and the Child. But the cycles
spin away down "the ringing grooves of change." From Egypt has passed
away that decreed Christianity. Now from the minaret the muezzin cries,
and in palm-shaded villages I hear the loud hymns of earnest pilgrims
starting on the journey to Mecca. And ever this painted chamber shelters
its mystery of poetry, its mystery of charm. And still its marvellous
colors are fresh as in the far-off pagan days, and the opening
lotus-flowers, and the closed lotus-buds, and the palm and the papyrus,
are on the perfect columns. And their intrinsic loveliness, and their
freshness, and their age, and the mysteries they have looked on--all
these facts are part of the spell that governs us to-day. In Edfu one is
enclosed in a wonderful austerity. And one can only worship. In Philae
one is wrapped in a radiance of color and one can only dream. For there
is coral-pink, and there a wonderful green, "like the green light that
lingers in the west," and there is a blue as deep as the blue of a
tropical sea; and there are green-blue and lustrous, ardent red. And the
odd fantasy in the coloring, is not that like the fantasy in the temple
of a dream? For those who painted these capitals for the greater glory
of Isis did not fear to depart from nature, and to their patient worship
a blue palm perhaps seemed a rarely sacred thing. And that palm is part
of the spell, and the reliefs upon the walls and even the Coptic crosses
that are cut into the stone.
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