of grief.  So I must always think of it, dark, tragic, and superb.  The Egyptians once believed that when death came to a man, the soul of him, which they called the Ba, winged its way to the gods, but that, moved by a sweet unselfishness, it returned sometimes to his tomb, to give comfort to the poor, deserted mummy.  Upon the lids of sarcophagi it is sometimes represented as a bird, flying down to, or resting upon, the mummy.  As I went onward in the darkness, among the columns, over the blocks of stone that form the pavements, seeing vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the king before Osiris; as I mounted and descended with the priests to roof and floor, I longed, instead of the clamour of the bats, to hear the light flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying from Paradise to this sad temple of the desert to bring her comfort in the gloom.  I thought of her as a poor woman, suffering as only women can in loneliness.

In the museum of Cairo there is the mummy of “the lady Amanit, priestess of Hathor.”  She lies there upon her back, with her thin body slightly turned toward the left side, as if in an effort to change her position.  Her head is completely turned to the same side.  Her mouth is wide open, showing all the teeth.  The tongue is lolling out.  Upon the head the thin, brown hair makes a line above the little ear, and is mingled at the back of the head with false tresses.  Round the neck is a mass of ornaments, of amulets and beads.  The right arm and hand lie along the body.  The expression of “the lady Amanit” is very strange, and very subtle; for it combines horror—­which implies activity—­with a profound, an impenetrable repose, far beyond the reach of all disturbance.  In the temple of Denderah I fancied the lady 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.”