WONDERS OF EGYPT.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 118, 28 January 1926, Page 1

WONDERS OF EGYPT.

INNUMERABLE TRACES OF A PAST AGE. The Egypt of to-day would not long detain either tourist or artist were it not that, behind it, there hovers the prodigious, insoluble enigma of a civilisation that goes back more than seven thousand years, and lias left on his earth of ours innumerable traces that are as clear, as fresh, as deeply graven as though they dated from yester- 1 day . There is nothing in the whole ivorld, writes Maurice Maeterlinck in the “Forum,” that can compare with -the temple of Luxor, the tomb of the Valley of the Kings and of Sakliara; with the pyramids, with the underground volts of Apis. There is nothing not even the famous temple of Angkor or the palaces in China, that is so strange, so unexpected, so bewildering, so curiously, disconcertingly human—and human in a fashion that does not seem to belong to this planet. Nowheie in the world can we find an art that is so fantastic and yet so nicely balanced, so barbarous and yet so exquisitely cultured; an art that wanders with the same graceful ease from the colossal to the puerile, from the sublime to the grotesque; that produces now a flimsy sketch, and then a perfect drawing finished down to the minutest detail; an art leaping from the most appalling monstrosity to a truth and sincerity that are as delicately real and true, as moving, as any great masterpiece painted by man. No race, no people, not even the people of Greece or China, has set so lasting, so powerful, so ineffaceable a seal upon this earth, or flashed on the world a vision so compact and massive, so absolute, so stupendous, so logical in its apparent illogicality, so emmeasurable within its self-imposed limits, so perfectly rhythmic In its own special rhythm. If Egypt had never been, or, if. like Atlantis, all her monuments had disappeared in a planetary catastrophe, the history of this world would be the poorer for one of the most striking manifestations of the human mind; as it is also probable that Grecian art and architecture, and those that derive from them, would have been vastly different.