And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the
columns with their opening lotus flowers. For it is the hall of lotus
columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking-place of the king.

There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns
of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near the
sun. Near the sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to those
who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle halls, the
columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky. And flowers of
stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged! That does not matter.
There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the thought that
directed the hands which shaped them and placed them where they are.
In Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient Egyptians loved
the _Nymphaea lotus_, which is the white lotus, and the _Nymphaea
coeruloea_, the lotus that is blue. Did they not place Horus in its cup,
and upon the head of Nefer-Tum, the nature god, who represented in
their mythology the heat of the rising sun, and who seems to have been
credited with power to grant life in the world to come, set it as a
sort of regal ornament? To Seti I., when he returned in glory from his
triumphs over the Syrians, were given bouquets of lotus-blossoms by
the great officers of his household. The tiny column of green feldspar
ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, even as the carnelian buckle
typified the blood of Isis, which washed away all sin. Kohl pots were
fashioned in the form of the lotus, cartouches sprang from it, wine
flowed from cups shaped like it. The lotus was part of the very life of
Egypt, as the rose, the American Beauty rose, is part of our social
life of to-day. And here, in the Ramesseum, I found campaniform, or
lotus-flower capitals on the columns--here where Rameses once perhaps
dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that famous combat when, "like
Baal in his fury," he fought single-handed against the host of the