And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of Karnak.
Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under many kings its ruins are as complex as were probably once its completed temples, with their shrines, their towers, their courts, their hypostyle halls. As I looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made more touching than in daytime, those alluring complexities, brought by the night and Khuns into a unity that was both tender and superb. Masses of masonry lay jumbled in shadow and in silver; gigantic walls cast sharply defined gloom; obelisks pointed significantly to the sky, seeming, as they always do, to be murmuring a message; huge doorways stood up like giants unafraid of their loneliness and yet pathetic in it; here was a watching statue, there one that seemed to sleep, seen from afar. Yonder Queen Hatshepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el-Bahari, and who is more familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left her traces, and nearer, to the right, Rameses III had made a temple, surely for the birds, so fond they are of it, so pertinaciously they haunt it. Rameses II, mutilated and immense, stood on guard before the terrific hall of Seti I; and between him and my platform in the air rose the solitary lotus column that prepares you for the wonder of Seti’s hall, which otherwise might almost overwhelm you--unless you are a Scotch lady in a helmet. And Khuns had his temple here by the Sphinx of the twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who created “the sun egg and the moon egg,” and who was said--only said, alas!--to have established on earth the “everlasting justice,” had his, and still their stones receive the silver moon-rays and wake the wonder of men. Thothmes III, Thothmes I, Shishak, who smote the kneeling prisoners and vanquished Jeroboam, Medamut and Mut, Amenhotep I, and Amenhotep II--all have left their records or been celebrated at Karnak. Purposely I mingled them in my mind--did not attempt to put them in their proper order, or even to disentangle gods and goddesses from conquerors and kings. In the warm and seductive night Khuns whispered to me: “As long ago at Bekhten I exorcized the demon from the suffering Princess, so now I exorcize from these ruins all spirits but my own. To-night these ruins shall suggest nothing but majesty, tranquillity, and beauty. Their records are for Ra, and must be studied by his rays. In mine they shall speak not to the intellect, but only to the emotions and the soul.”