Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/181

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
166
LECTURE IV.

the right side of the entrance to his palace. By some extraordinary catastrophe, the statue has been thrown down, and the Arabs have scooped their millstones out of his face; but you can still see what he was—the largest statue in the world. Far and wide that enormous head must have been seen, eyes, mouth and ears. Far and wide you must have seen his vast hands resting on his elephantine knees. You sit on his breast and look at the Osiride statues which support the portico of the temple, and which anywhere else would put to shame even the statues of the cherubs in St. Peter's—and they seem pigmies before him. His arm is thicker than their whole bodies. The only part of the temple or palace at all in proportion to him must have been the gateway, which rose in pyramidal towers, now broken down, and rolling in a wide ruin down to the plain.

"Nothing which now exists in the world can give any notion of what the effect must have been when he was erect. … No one who entered that building, whether it were temple or palace, could have thought of anything else but that stupendous being who thus had raised himself up above the whole world of gods and men.

"And when from the statue you descend to the palace, the same impression is kept up. … Everywhere the king is conquering, worshipping, ruling. The palace is the Temple, the king is Priest. But everywhere the