and full of a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were no
longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised surely by a supreme
artist to heighten here and there the beauty of the sky. Everything that
moved against the afterglow--man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog
and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse--became at once an
ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving
it, the color in which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched serenely,
as if he knew the end. And almost suddenly the miraculous effort failed.
Things again revealed their truth, whether commonplace or not. That pool
of the Nile was no more a red jewel set in a feathery pattern of strange
design, but only water fading from my sight beyond a group of palms. And
that below me was only a camel going homeward, and that a child leading
a bronze-colored sheep with a curly coat, and that a dusty, flat-roofed
hovel, not the fairy home of jinn, or the abode of some magician working
marvels with the sun-rays he had gathered in his net. The air was no
longer thrilling with music. The breast that had heaved with a divine
breath was still as the breast of a corpse.

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 hypo-style halls. As I
looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made more
touching than in day-time, 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