The times. (Owosso, Mich.) 1882-1897, 1894-07-06
CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES.
The Great Temple of Thebes Would Hold
Four Notre DANES.

Che Great Temple OF Thebes Would Hold
Four Notre Danes.
The ordinary tourist is likely enough to
emerge from the temple of Karnak stupe-
fed by that nero vastness of scale-those
Titanic proportions of architecture which
ranked it ages ago, when It was intact or
nearly so, and which rank 1t today, when
1t is ruin, among the wonders of the
world. 1t is not the mere area of the
mighty building which Expresses one,
though four cathedrals of Notre Dame
would CO. it is said, into the Hypostyle
hall. Nor is it merely the altitude to which
the towering columns mount, or their enor-
nous girth, or their forestlike array. You
think of those huge pillars that lose them.
selves in the upper gloom at Seville and
of the endlessly intersecting avenues of the
mosque of Cordova, and you feel that In
these two points, at any rate, Karnak, II
it be not exactly rivaled, is not so very far
ahead.
1t is the astonishing successful combi-
nation of all the widely differing architec-
tural effects which are severally produced
by number, by size, by proportion, by dis.
position, by the imperious influence Of
mass and the winning appeal of perspec-
tive-it is the combination of these into q
bly, 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 surrounding monoliths as
q giant would lift child, have no sugges-
ton of unwieldiness in their colossal size,
leave no sense of excess in their multitu-
dinous number. The calyx capital into
which each column blossoms would take
10 men to span its monstrous girth; yet 1t
opens out against tho blue Egyptian sky
above its roofiess head as lightly as If 1t
were the finest Gothic tracery above an
English cathedral nave.
Everywhere the feeling of absolute fit
ness, of perfect proportion redeems this
majestic hall of the offenye of mere Brob-
dingnagerie, and whether the eye dwells
upon the parts or sweeps the whole, wheth-
er it travels through the endless alleys of
this forest of stone and rests by turns upon
base and shaft and flowerlille capital of its
component columns, 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 ar
tistic taste is alike satisfied. So admirable
indeed are the proportions of the whole
that the stupendous bulk or It's constltu-
ent parts is hardly realized. Derange-
ment 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 SUI
perincumbent burden Of its huge plinth,
dislocated and askew, toward one of its
fellows. The cause of this portentous dis
placement no man knows, but the vague
tradition that ascribes it to the conquerof
Cambyses may 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 gunpow-
der, could ever have done the work of in
choate destruction which is above our
heads. Nothing short of an earthquake
could have thrust one of those tremendous
plinths into the position of that overhang-
ing horror. London Telegraph