mself, the procreator,
drawn often with an absolute crudity, would seem chaste compared with
the hosts of this temple. For here, on the contrary, the figures might
be those of living people, palpitating and voluptuous, who had posed
themselves for sport in these consecrated attitudes. The throat of the
beautiful goddess, her hips, her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with
a searching and lingering realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver.
She and her spouse, the beautiful Horus, son of Iris, contemplate
each other, naked, one before the other, and their laughing eyes are
intoxicated with love.

Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and
massive as so many fortresses. They were used formerly for mysterious
and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no
corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs. Bats
are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted in
fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the neighbouring
fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that they hang like
stalactites.

Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great
roofs of the temple--staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by
loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls. And
here again are the inevitable rows of figures, carved on all the walls,
in the same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as we ascend, making
all the time the self-same signs one to another.

As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in Egyptian sunlight and swept
by a cold and bitter wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an aviary. It
is the kingdom of the sparrows, who have built their nests in thousands
in this temple of the complaisant goddess. They twitter now all together
and with all their might out of very joy of living. It is an esplanade,
this roof--a solitude paved with gigantic flagstones. From it we see,
beyond the heaps of ruins, those happy plains, which are spread out with
such a perfect serenity on the very ground where once stood the town of
Denderah, beloved of Hathor and one of the most famous of Upper Egypt.
Exquisitely green are these plains with the new growth of wheat and
lucerne and bean; and the herds that are grouped here and there on the
fresh verdure of the level pastures, swaying now and undulating in the
wind, look like so many dark patches. And the two chains of mountains of
rose-coloured stone, tha