The second terrace of the temple, a big open space with a lane of recumbent sphinxes, was flanked by a colonnade. Some thirty cubits higher was the third, or upper, terrace of the temple, completely surrounded by a colonnade and filling a natural indenture in the cliff face.
The lower terrace of the temple extended in width over a distance of some one and a half stadia; at the extremes there were simple cylindrical columns, in the centre they were square and higher up they had six or sixteen faces. The central columns, the capitals of the side columns, the cornices of the porticos and the human figures were all painted in bright blue and red colours which made the glaring white of the stone still more dazzling.
This temple, brightly lit up by the sun, formed a striking contrast to other gloomy, oppressive temple buildings that Pandion had seen. The young Hellene could not imagine anything more beautiful than those rows of snow-white columns in a framework of coloured patterns. On the terraces grew trees such as Pandion had never seen before — low trees with a dense cluster of branches covered with tiny leaves growing close to each other. These trees gave off a very powerful aroma and their golden-green foliage gave them a very gay appearance backed by snow-white columns accentuated by the red cliffs.
In a burst of wild admiration Kidogo nudged Pandion, smacked his lips and emitted inarticulate sounds expressing approbation.
None of the slaves knew that the temple before which they stood had been built about five hundred years earlier by the architect Sennemut for his mistress Queen Hatshe-psut (Hatshepsut — Queen of the XVIIIth Dynasty (1500–1457 B.C.). The temple is at Deir-el-Bahri.) and was called Zesher-Zesheru — the most magnificent of the magnificent. (The Temple of Montuhotep IV, a Pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom, Xlth Dynasty, about 2050 B.C). The strange trees growing on the terraces had been brought from the Land of Punt to which Queen Hatshepsut had sent a big expedition by sea. Since that time it had been the custom for every new expedition to Punt to bring back young trees for the temple and renew the old plantation which was thus seemingly preserved from ancient days.
The voice of the overseer came from the distance. The slaves moved hurriedly away from the temple and passing round it to the left, found yet another temple, also built on a ledge on the cliff, this time in the form of a small pyramid resting on rows of closely placed columns.
Higher up the river there were two other temples of polished grey granite. The overseer led his party to the nearest of them where they joined another party of about two hundred slaves busy dismantling the temple. The white plaster on the interior walls was decorated with brightly-coloured drawings executed with great mastery. The building officials and technicians of Aigyptos, who had charge of the work, were only interested in the polished granite blocks with which the portico and the colonnade were faced. The interior walls were ruthlessly destroyed.
Pandion was shocked at this wanton destruction of ancient works of art and managed to get into the group of slaves employed in piling the stones on to wooden sleds and dragging them down to the river to be loaded on a low-lying boat.
He did not know that the Pharaohs of Aigyptos had long been dismantling ancient temples, mostly those of the Middle Kingdom (2160–1580 B.C.) which contained a large quantity of beautifully dressed stone; they had no respect for monuments of the past and hastened to perpetuate their own names by building temples and tombs from ready materials.
Neither the Hyksos, the barbaric Shepherd Kings who had conquered Tha-Quem many centuries before, nor the slaves who revolted and ruled the country for a short period some two hundred years before Pandion was born, had touched these magnificent edifices. But now, following the secret instructions of the new Pharaohs of Aigyptos, the temples and tombs of the ancient kings were being dismantled and gold poured into the treasury of the rulers from the plundered tombs hidden under the ancient sand-covered pyramids and from the magnificent underground tombs of the great kings of the XVIIIth, XIXth and XXth dynasties.
Pandion spent altogether three months on this work of dismantling the temple. He and Kidogo worked hard, doing their utmost to lighten the labour of their comrades. This was exactly what their taskmasters wanted: the labour system in Tha-Quem was organized in such a way that the weak had to keep pace with the strong. The unusual strength and shrewdness of Kidogo and Pandion attracted the attention of the overseers and they were sent to the workshop of the stone-masons to learn the craft. One of Pharaoh’s sculptors took them away from this workshop and thus cut them off completely from their comrades in the shahne. Pandion and Kidogo were housed in a long, uncomfortable shed with a number of other slaves who had already mastered the simple craft. Native inhabitants of Aigyptos, free craftsmen, occupied a few huts in one corner of the big workshop yard where there were piles of undressed stone and rubble. The Egyptians kept markedly clear of the slaves as though they might be punished for any connections with them; later Pandion learned that this actually was the case.
The master of the workshop, a royal sculptor, did not suspect that Pandion and Kidogo were real sculptors and was astonished at the progress they made. The young men longed for some creative activity and gave themselves up whole-heartedly to their work, forgetting for a time that they were working for the hated Pharaoh and the vile land of slavery.
Kidogo waxed enthusiastic over his models of animals: hippopotamuses, crocodiles, antelopes and other strange beasts Pandion had never seen; his models were used by other slaves to make faience statuettes. The Egyptian sculptor noticed Pandion’s fondness for modelling people and undertook to teach this promising young Ekwesha; he insisted on the utmost thoroughness in work done to order. “The slightest negligence is the ruin of perfection,” the Egyptian sculptor would constantly repeat — this was the watchword of the ancient masters of the Black Land. The Hellene studied assiduously and at times his nostalgia was forgotten. He made great progress in the precise work of finishing off statues and bas-reliefs from hard stone and in the embossing of gold ornaments.
Pandion accompanied the sculptor to Pharaoh’s palace and saw there apartments of unbelievable luxury. On the coloured floors of the royal quarters there were representations of the thickets of the Great River with their plants and animals, all drawn wonderfully lifelike and framed with wavy lines or spirals of many colours. The faience tiles on the walls of the rooms were covered with a transparent blue glaze through which shone fantastic designs in gold leaf, works of art that were nothing less than magic.
Amidst all this magnificence the young Hellene looked with hatred on the haughty, immobile courtiers. He examined their white garments, ironed in tiny pleats, their heavy necklaces, rings and lockets of cast gold, their wigs of curled hair falling to the shoulders and their embroidered slippers with upturned toes.
Like a silent shadow Pandion followed the hurrying master sculptor; on his way he took note of valuable thin-walled vessels cut from rock-crystal and hard stone, glass vases and pots of grey faience decorated with pale blue designs. He was fully aware of the tremendous amount of labour that had gone into the production of these works of art.
The greatest impression was produced by a gigantic temple near the Gardens of Amon where Pandion began his life as a slave, languishing behind the high walls of the she fine.
This was a temple of many gods built in the course of more than a thousand years. Each of the kings of Tha-Quem had added something new to an already huge structure more than eight hundred cubits in length.
On the right bank of the river, within the bounds of the capital city Nut-Amon, or simply Nut — the city — as the Egyptians called it, lay magnificent gardens with straight rows of high palms at both ends of which were a number of temples. These temple buildings were connected by long avenues of statues of strange animals with the river-banks and the sacred lake in front of the Temple of Mut, a goddess that Pandion could not understand.
Granite beasts, three times the height of a man, with the bodies of lions and the heads of rams and men, gave him a sensation of oppre
ssiveness. Mysterious, frozen into immobility, they lay on their pedestals, close together, bordering an avenue lit up by the blinding sun, their heads hanging over passers-by.
The lofty obelisks, fifty cubits high, covered in bright yellow sheets of an amalgam of gold and silver, gleamed like incandescent needles thrust through the coarse, dark foliage of the palms. In daytime the silver-covered slabs of stone with which the avenues were paved blinded the astonished eyes; by night, in the light of the moon and stars, they were like the flowing stream of an unearthly river of light.
Enormous pylons flanked the entrance to the temple. The huge surfaces of these pylons were covered with enormous sculptures of the gods and Pharaohs and with inscriptions in the mysterious language of Tha-Quem. Colossal doors, covered with sheets of bronze inlaid with ornaments in the gold-silver amalgam, closed the passage between the pylons; their cast bronze hinges, each the weight of several bulls, were imposing in their massiveness.
The interior of the temple was a forest of thick columns fifty cubits high carrying heavy bas-reliefs that filled the upper part of the temple. The huge blocks of stone in the walls, roof and columns were polished and fitted to each other with miraculous precision.
Drawings and bas-reliefs, painted in bright colours, covered the walls, columns and cornices in several tiers. Sun discs, hawks and animal-headed gods gazed down morosely from the mysterious semi-darkness of the distant parts of the temple.
Outside there were the same bright colours, gold and silver; the monstrously massive buildings and sculptures stunned, blinded and oppressed all who saw them.
Everywhere Pandion saw statues of pink and black granite, red sandstone and yellow limestone — the deified rulers of Tha-Quem sitting in inhuman serenity and arrogant poses. In some cases these were colossi up to forty cubits in height cut from the living rock, angular and crude; others, awe-inspiring in their dreadful gloom, were carefully painted, well-finished sculptures, much more than human height.
Pandion had grown up amongst simple people in constant communion with nature and was at first overcome with awe. Everything in this huge, rich country produced a most profound impression on him.
The giant structures built by some means beyond the ken of mortal man, the awful gods hidden in the gloom of the temples, the incomprehensible religion with its intricate rites, the mark of antiquity on the sand-embedded buildings — all this at first gave Pandion a sense of oppressiveness. He believed that the haughty and inscrutable inhabitants of Aigyptos were the masters of profound truths, of some powerful science that was hidden in the writings of the Black Land which no foreigner could understand.
The country itself, squeezed by death-dealing, lifeless deserts into a narrow strip of valley watered by a huge river carrying its waters from some distant and unknown place in the far south, was a world unto itself, in no way related to the other parts of Oicumene.
The sober mind of the young Hellene, however, gradually sifted this mass of impressions in the search for simple and natural truths.
Pandion now had time for meditation; the young sculptor’s spirit, with its constant striving for the beautiful, began to revolt against the life and art of Aigyptos, a protest that later became conscious.
The fertile land, in which inclement weather was unknown, the bright, clear and almost permanently cloudless sky, the amazingly transparent and invigorating air, all seemed to have been specially created for a healthy and happy life. Little as the young Hellene knew of the country, he could not but help noticing the poverty and crowded conditions of the Nemhu, the poorest and most numerous inhabitants of Aigyptos. The colossal temples and statues, the beautiful gardens could not hide the endless rows of mud hovels that housed tens of thousands of craftsmen working for those palaces and temples. As far as the slaves languishing in hundreds of compounds were concerned, Pandion knew about these from his own experience.
It gradually became clear to him that the art of Aigyptos, subordinated to the rulers of the country, the Pharaohs and priests, and controlled by them, was the exact opposite of that which he sought — the reflection of life in art.
It was only when he caught sight of the temple Zesher-Zesheru, open and designed to merge with the surrounding landscape, that he felt that here was something close and pleasing to him.
All other giant temples and tombs were, as a rule, hidden behind high walls. And behind those walls, the craftsmen of Aigyptos. working at the bidding of the priests, had made use of all the artifice at their disposal to take man away from life, to humiliate him and crush his spirit, force him to realize his own insignificance in face of the majesty of the gods and the Pharaohs.
The enormous size of the structures, the colossal amount of labour and material involved did crush the spirit of man. The constantly repeated succession of identical, monotonous forms, piled one on the other, created the impression of infinite distance. Identical sphinxes, identical columns, walls and pylons — all with a careful scantiness of detail — were solid and immobile. Gigantic statues, all alike, lined the passages within the temples, gloomy and ominous.
The rulers of Aigyptos and arbiters of her art were afraid of space; they fenced themselves off from the world of nature and then filled the interiors of. their temples with massive stone columns, thick walls and stone beams that often occupied more space than did the room between them. The greater the distance from the entrance, the thicker grew the forest of columns in the temple, and the rooms, insufficiently lit, grew progressively darker. The huge number of narrow doorways made the temple mysteriously inaccessible and the permanent semi-darkness served to increase the fear of the gods.
Pandion gradually fathomed the secret of this deliberate effect on the spirit of man, an effect achieved through many centuries of building experience.
If Pandion could have seen the enormous pyramids, whose perfect geometrical form stood out so sharply above the wavy lines of the surrounding sand, he would have sensed more fully the imperious manner of setting off man against nature. This was the method adopted by the rulers of Tha-Quem to conceal their fear of the unknown, a fear reflected in the sullen, mysterious religion of the Egyptians.
The craftsmen of the Tha-Quem glorified their gods and their rulers, striving to express their strength in colossal statues of the Pharaohs and in the symmetrical immobility of their massive bodies.
On the walls the Pharaohs themselves were depicted in pictures more than life size. Dwarfs swarmed around their feet — the other inhabitants of the Black Land. In this way the kings of Egypt used every means at their disposal to emphasize their greatness. They believed that by humiliating the people in every way they were exalting themselves, that in this way their influence would be augmented.
Pandion still knew very little of the beautiful native art, the real art of the people of the Black Land, that was not held in bondage by courtiers and priests but was expressed in articles of everyday use amongst the common people. He felt that real art lay in a simple and joyful coalescence with life itself. It should be as different from everything created in Aigyptos as his native land with its variety of rivers, fields, forests, sea and mountains, with its colourful change of seasons differed from this country where the terraced cliffs rose so monotonously from one single river valley, everywhere alike, that was surrounded on all sides by burning- sands and filled with carefully tilled gardens. Thousands of years before the inhabitants of Aigyptos had hidden from the hostile world in the valley of the Nile. Today their descendants were trying to turn their faces away from life by hiding in their palaces and temples.
Pandion felt that the majesty of the art of Aigyptos was to a considerable extent the fruit of the natural abilities of slaves of different races; the most talented were selected from millions and these involuntarily devoted all their creative effort to the glorification of the country that oppressed them. When he had freed himself of his submission to the might of Aigyptos, Pandion resolved to escape as soon as possible and to convince his friend Kidogo of
the necessity of this step.
His head was filled with these ideas when he, with Kidogo and ten other slaves, made a long trip to the ruins of the ancient town of Akhetaton. (Akhetaton (Tel el-Amarna) — capital of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, 1375–1358 B.C.) The young sculptor ruffled the smooth surface of the river with his oars, the fast movement of the boat downstream giving him a sensation of joy. The journey was a long one, almost three thousand stadia, a distance virtually equal to that which separated his native land from Crete and which had once seemed to him to be immeasurably great. During this voyage Pandion learned that the Great Green Sea, as the people of Aigyptos called it, and on the northern shores of which Thessa was awaiting his return, was twice as far away as Akhetaton.
Pandion’s happy mood passed very quickly: for the first time he realized how far inland he was in the depths of Aigyptos and how great a distance separated him from the seacoast where there might be a possibility of returning home.
He bent moodily over his oars and the boat slipped over the smooth surface of the endless river, past thickets of green shrubs, tilled fields, reed jungles and white-hot cliffs.
The royal sculptor lay under a striped awning in the sternsheets and was fanned by a servile slave. Rows of tiny huts stretched along the banks — the fertile land fed a tremendous number of people, thousands of people swarmed the fields, gardens and papyrus thickets, toiling to earn a scanty livelihood. Thousands of people packed the narrow streets of the. countless villages on the outskirts of which towered huge ungainly temples, closely shut off from the sun.
It suddenly struck Pandion that not only he and his comrades were doomed to a pitiful existence in Tha-Quem, but the inhabitants of those miserable huts were also enslaved by their joyless drudgery, that they, too, were the slaves of the ruler and his courtiers despite the fact that they despised him, Pandion, as a branded savage…
The Land of Foam Page 9
