Philae the more because of
the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious
tenderness of charm--a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with
its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw
that the island must be ignored--if possible.

The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the
year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a
drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much
of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem
crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded
river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes. As
I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least
there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned
toward "Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple standing apart from it, which
already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its
gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry
above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple,
with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light
on the first real day of spring.

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.