Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impending that will not, cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he loomed over the Egypt that is dead, he looms over the Egypt of to-day.  Everywhere you meet his traces, everywhere you hear his name.  You say to a tall young Egyptian:  “How big you are growing, Hassan!”

He answers, “Come back next year, my gentleman, and I shall be like Rameses the Great.”

Or you ask of the boatman who rows you, “How can you pull all day against the current of the Nile?” And he smiles, and lifting his brown arm, he says to you:  “Look!  I am strong as Rameses the great.”

This familiar fame comes down through some twenty years.  Carved upon limestone and granite, now it seems engraven also on every Egyptian heart that beats not only with the movement of shadoof, or is not buried in the black soil fertilized by Hapi.  Thus can inordinate vanity prolong the true triumph of genius, and impress its own view of itself upon the minds of millions.  This Rameses is believed to be the Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel.

As I sat in the Ramesseum that morning, I recalled his face—­the face of an artist and a dreamer rather than that of a warrior and oppressor; Asiatic, handsome, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, aristocratic, and refined.  I could imagine it bending above the little serpents of the sistrum as they lifted their melodious voices to bid Typhon depart, or watching the dancing women’s rhythmic movements, or smiling half kindly, half with irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who made her plaint: 

     “What is sweet to the mouth, to me is as the gall of birds;
     Thy breath alone can comfort my heart.”

And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the columns with their opening lotus flowers.  For it is the hall of lotus columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking-place of the king.

There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near the sun.  Near the sun!  Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to those who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle halls, the columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky.  And flowers of stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged!  That does not matter.  There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the thought that directed the hands which shaped them and placed them where they are.  In Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient Egyptians loved the Nymphaea lotus, which is the white lotus, and the Nymphaea coeruloea, the lotus that is blue.  Did they not place Horus in its cup, and upon the head of Nefer-Tum, the nature god, who represented in their mythology the heat of the rising sun, and who seems to have been credited with power to grant life in the world to come, set it as a sort of regal ornament?  To Seti I., when he returned in glory from his triumphs over the Syrians,