Randy angled his head back.“And they are carved all the way to the top,” he marveled.
“Painted as well,” Stella said, awestruck.She was circling one of the columns, as if she was studying all the carvings.
“They were indeed,” Mahmood confirmed.He pointed to the underside of the architraves.Between each capital atop the columns were painted hieroglyphics, their colors still vibrant.“But it is not yet known what is written up there or on the columns.”
“You cannot read them?”Barbara asked in surprise.
“I cannot, my lady,” Mahmood admitted.“Not all of it.I do know that every place you see an oval shape around a series of hieroglyphics, it depicts the name of a pharaoh.”
Barbara’s eyes widened as she returned her attention to the column to which she was standing.
“The smaller columns have a circumference of seven-and-twenty feet,” Diana stated.She had pulled out her sketchpad and a pencil from her satchel, prepared to begin drawing the one in front of her.
“How many columns are there in this part of the temple?”Harry asked of their guide.“It’s like a forest,” he added, for despite the midday sun, the columns provided shade where they stood.
“One-hundred-and-twenty-two is the number of the smaller columns,” Mahmood replied.“Although calling it a marsh of papyrus plants would be a better analogy than a forest of trees, for we believe that is what the builders intended,” he explained.
“So these larger columns here in the middle must have supported a higher roof?”Will guessed.
“Yes.The central nave,” Mahmood confirmed.
“Is there any thought as to how deep these columns go?How tall they really are?”Tom asked, as if he was determined to gain Helen’s attention.
Mahmood waved for him to follow, and the two moved toward the outer wall and the last row of columns.Between two columns, the sand was considerably lower on this side of the hypostyle, and it appeared as if someone had dug a channel between the columns and the wall deeper than even Tom was tall.The carvings on the exposed sandstone suggested they continued well below the bottom level of the deep channel.“Mayhap sixty or seventy feet tall,” Mahmood said.“Until the sand is removed to the original floor, we will not know.”
“Seventy feet?”Tom repeated in awe.He shook his head.“How would they have even erected such tall columns?”
Mahmood shrugged.“Using the same techniques they did to build the pyramids,” he suggested.
“Up there, above the architraves,” Diana said, pointing to some vertical pillars with crossbeams that formed rectangular openings above the largest columns.“Were those windows?”
Mahmood glanced up to where she indicated.“Indeed,” he agreed.“Those are the window frames of the clerestory.”In some of the openings, the grills were still intact.
“So it would have been light here in the temple,” she mused, her gaze going to the last two great columns at the back of the hypostyle.Not only were they devoid of carvings, their surfaces weren’t nearly as smooth as the others in the hall.
“They are unfinished,” Mahmood confirmed, noting her gaze.“But they give us a hint of what was involved in building such a temple.”
“Indeed,” Diana murmured, before she continued her survey of the temple.
Several in their party had already ventured beyond the third pylon, where a complete obelisk and the base of another stood.
“The obelisks of Thutmosis the First,” Diana said before she displayed a huge grin.“I wasn’t sure they would still be here,” she remarked.
“Why not?”Randy asked.
“I feared the French might have transported them to Paris,” she whispered.
“Ah,” he replied.
“At one time, there may have been six obelisks in this area between the third and fourth pylons,” Mahmood said.He indicated the area to the right, where a line of mounds of rubble indicated another series of pylons perpendicular to the ones they had passed through.“That was once another entrance to the temple out there,” he explained.“And this is where they intersected.Imagine the spectacle of the processions during the annual festivals.It would have been quite grand.”
Barbara glanced up at Will.“Rather hard to imagine given the current state of this courtyard,” she murmured.
He chuckled.“Still, you have to be impressed that another monolith is still standing here,” he said, his attention on the Obelisk of Hatshepsut.The base of it appeared to have been protected by a series of walls around it that had partly crumbled.
Meanwhile, the base of its mate stood nearby.The top half of it lay on the debris of a temple dedicated to Wadjyt, or the Eye of Horus.Noting the pyramidal shape at the end of the monolith and where it had landed, David chuckled.“It poked out the Eye of Horus,” he jested.
Mahmood was not amused, and Diana seemed ready to scold her cousin-by-marriage for his comment.
