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 oppressiveness. 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.