The Kimball graphic. (Kimball, Brule County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1905, 1894-07-07
CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES.
The Great Temple of Thebet Would Hold
Four Notrc Danes.

In any case the ordinary tourist is
likely enough to emerge from the tenn
pie of Karnak stupefied by that mere
yastness of scale, those Titanic proper
tiors of architecture which ranked it
ages ago, when it was intact or nearly
SO, md which rank it to day, when it is
a ruin, among the wonders of the world.
1t is not the mere area of the mighty
building which Expresses one, though
four catlledrals of Notre Dame would
| go, it is said, into the Hypostyic Hall.
Nor is it merely the altitude to which
the towering columns mount, or their
enormous girth, or their forcst-like al.
ray. You think of those huge pillars
that lose themselves in the upper gloom
at Seville, and of the endlessly inter-
secting venue of the Mosque of Cor
dova, and you feel that in these two
points, ut any rate. Karnak, if it be not
exactly rivaled, isnot so very far ahead.
1t IL the astonishing successful combi-
nation OF all the widely differing archi-
tectural effects which are s~everally pro-
duced by number, by size, by proper
ton, by disposition, by the imperious
influence OF mass, and the winning APP
peal of perspcctive-it is the combina-
ton of these into a pilalanx of forces to
be launched irresistibly against the
senses and the soul of the beholder that
makes the great temple what it is.
Those Atlantean columns, which were
built, surely, to uphold the heavens
themselves, and which seem to bear up
their enormous surmounting monoliths
as a giant would lift a child, have no
suggestion of unwieldiness in their
colossal size, leave no sense of excess in
their multitudinoEs number. The calyx-
capital into which each column bios
SONS would take ten men to span its
monstrous girth; yctitopens out against
the blue Egyptian sky above its ~rootless
head as lightly rs if it were the finest
Gothic traccry above an English cathe-
dral nave.
Everywhere the feeling of absolute
fitness, OF perfect proportion redeems
this majestic hall of the otfcnse of mere
Brobdin"nagerie; and whether the eve
dwells upon the parts or sweeps the
whole-whether it travels through the
endless alleys of this forest of stone and
rests by turns upon base and shaft and
iower-like capital of its component col
umns, or pauses to peruse walls, deep
craven with colossal gods and kings,
and still glowing here and there with
the undying colors of 1000 years, the
artistic taste is alike satisfied. So adj
mirable, indeed, are the proportions of
the whole that the %stupendous bulk of
its constituent parts is hardly realized.
arrangement of their symmetry seems
necessary to enable one to measure it in
all its full awfulness, AS we do there,
where one of these gigantic pillars has
fallen and bows its hundreds of tons of
weight and the superintendent burden
Of its huge plinth, dislocated and askew,
toward M of its fellows. The cause of
this portentous displacement no mar
knows; but the vague tradition that as
cribes it to the conqueror Cambyses,
Hmay be safely dismissed. No mortal
hands, relying solely on the strength of
human muscles and the only known
forces of an age that knew not of gum
powder, could ever have done the work
of inchoate destruction which is above
our heads. Nothing short of an earth
quake could have thrust one of those
tremendous plinths into the position of
that ~oycrhanging horror. Il. d. Iraiu
IN London telegram.