Amanit ministering sadly, even
terribly, to a lonely goddess, moving in fear through an eternal gloom,
dying at last there, overwhelmed by tasks too heavy for that tiny body,
the ultra-sensitive spirit that inhabited it. And now she sleeps--one
feels that, as one gazes at the mummy--very profoundly, though not yet
very calmly, the lady Amanit. But her goddess--still she wakes upon her
column.

When I came out at last into the sunlight of the growing day, I circled
the temple, skirting its gigantic, corniced walls, from which at
intervals the heads and paws of resting lions protrude, to see another
woman whose fame for loveliness and seduction is almost as legendary as
Aphrodite's. It is fitting enough that Cleopatra's form should be graven
upon the temple of Hathor; fitting, also, that though I found her in the
presence of deities, and in the company of her son, Caesarion, her face,
which is in profile, should have nothing of Hathor's sad impressiveness.
This, no doubt, is not the real Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face
suggests a certain self-complacent cruelty and sensuality essentially
human, and utterly detached from all divinity, whereas in the face
of the goddess there is a something remote, and even distantly
intellectual, which calls the imagination to "the fields beyond."

As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the boy clad in the rope of
plaited grass, and again he said, less shyly, "May your day be happy!"
It was a kindly wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a prophecy.
But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of Denderah, and I
remembered the legend of the lovely Lais, who, when she began to age,
covered herself from the eyes of men with a veil, and went every day at
evening to look upon her statue, in which the genius of Praxiteles had
rendered permanent the beauty the woman could not keep. One evening,
hanging to the statue's pedestal by a garland of red roses, the sculptor
found a mirror, upon the polished disk of which were traced these words:

"Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: no longer able to see
there what she was, she will not see there what she has become."

My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed dweller on the column in the first
hall, had she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Lais hung hers, at the
foot of the pedestal of the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil, would
surely cover the face that, solitary among the cruel evidences of
Christian ferocity, silent