No knowledge of antiquity, no long-cherished associations, no
searching after something to admire, is necessary here. The wonders of
Thebes rise before the astonished spectator like the creations of some
superior power. "It appeared to me," says Belzoni, "like entering
a city of giants, who, after a long conflict, were all destroyed,
leaving the ruins of their various temples as the only proofs of their
former existence." Denon's description of the first view of Thebes by
the French army, which he accompanied in the expedition into Upper
Egypt, is singularly characteristic. "On turning the point of a chain
of mountains which forms a kind of promontory, we saw all at once
ancient Thebes in its full extent--that Thebes whose magnitude has
been pictured to us by a single word in Homer, _hundred-gated_, a
poetical and unmeaning expression which has been so confidently
repeated ever since. This city, described in a few pages dictated
to Herodotus by Egyptian priests, which succeeding authors have
copied--renowned for numerous kings, who, through their wisdom, have
been elevated to the rank of gods; for laws which have been revered
without being known; for sciences which have been confided to proud
and mysterious inscriptions, wise and earliest monuments of the arts
which time has respected;--this sanctuary, abandoned, desolated
through barbarism, and surrendered to the desert from which it was
won; this city, shrouded in the veil of mystery by which even colossi
are magnified: this remote city, which imagination has only caught a
glimpse of through the darkness of time,--was still so gigantic an
apparition, that at the site of its scattered ruins, the army halted
of its own accord, and the soldiers, with one spontaneous movement,
clapped their hands.
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