The setting of Philae is severe.  Even in bright sunshine it has an iron look.  On a grey or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible.  In the old winters and springs one loved Philae the more because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious tenderness of charm—­a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with its buildings.  But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored—­if possible.

The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it.  The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air.  The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes.  As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease.  But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage.  Again I turned toward “Pharaoh’s Bed,” toward the temple standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.

I went first to “Pharaoh’s Bed.”

Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles’s statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf complexion—­one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the flame of passion behind it.  Imagine that woman attacked by a malady which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the color of her face—­from the throat upward to just beneath the nose—­from the warm white to a mottled, greyish hue.  Imagine the line that would seem to be traced between the two complexions—­the mottled grey below the warm white still glowing above.  Imagine this, and you have “Pharaoh’s Bed” and the temple of Philae as they are to-day.

XVII

“PHARAOH’S BED”

“Pharaoh’s Bed,” which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can “carry off,” as it were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole.  It is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular loveliness of color.  The spell it threw over you was not so much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity.