Northward upon the stream our boat is creeping,
The sky above is pearl, the river pearl,
And soon will coming night her shades unfurl
Like some great bird on stealthy pinions sweeping,
As the effulgence chills
And young stars stand above the Theban hills
Within whose fastnesses the kings are sleeping.
To them the roll of time is but a dreaming,
To them the lotus, mouldered on their breasts,
Still dripping from the Nile, in beauty rests,
As when the mourners broke those blossoms streaming
And shook the silver shower,
The pallid glory of the royal flower
Fit guerdon for a royal spirit deeming.
To-night it seems that peak and rugged boulder
Stand o’er their soundless dwellings for a sign;
Surely some cipher of a hand divine
Is graven yonder on the mountain’s shoulder,
Hidden in shadows vast
That melt to greyness as the boat slips past
With the slow current, and the sky grows colder.
Mayhap, the phantom of a past endeavour,
Born of that ancient striving to the light,
Has wrapt the secret sepulchres with might
And haunts the valley of the Nile for ever;
Breathing eternally
A note of immortality to be,
Resounding ceaselessly and dying never.
While, round the sleepers, sounds of feet have broken
The stillness that encompassed them so long,
And the loud voices of an idle throng
Within those halls of death have idly spoken;
While sacrilegious hands
Have loosed about them the funereal bands
To rob their bosoms of life’s symbolled token,
From one unchanging hope can none divide them,
Although its outward emblem be despoiled;
Though silence and the peace for which they toiled
A world whose ways they knew not has denied them,
That hope its wings has spread
Within the rifled strongholds of the dead
As the wings shadowed on the wall beside them.
Changeless, unaltered still the soul’s desire is,
Fixed as the hills whose heights we leave behind
To merge in fading colours undefined,
Purple and amethyst and rose and iris,
And, to the dripping oar,
The dusk is closing down along the shore,
The brooding dusk of Isis and Osiris.
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