Chapter 23 they cry

Luxor's first monument is the Temple of the Sun on the east bank of the Nile.Many international tourists have made great efforts to come here just to see it. It's funny to say that although I have come into contact with related text materials very early, I first obtained its perceptual images from a mystery film "Tragedy on the Nile" many years ago.Rows of ram stone carvings under the scorching sun, dizzying stone pillars, and mysterious falling stones at the top of the stone pillars are now among them, and I immediately feel that no matter which movie is shot here, it is an excessive luxury, even a crime.

As long as any stone pillar appears somewhere in the world alone, it will become the Optimus Prime that thousands of people look up to.We tried it, and it took twelve men with outstretched hands to surround a pillar, and such pillars here almost formed a small forest. Each stone pillar is engraved with pictographs, which are very different from Chinese pictographs. They are all specific objects, such as birds, insects, fish, and people. The recognized images are connected together, but no one knows the meaning.This is a discourse system that summons all things in the world together for mysterious singing. The ancient Egyptians drove this discourse system to climb the stone pillars in an attempt to communicate with the heavens.

But in my opinion, the stone pillar itself is a symbol of humanity.Human beings also come from the soil. I don’t know when they will break out of the ground, rise from the ground, and reach the sky. It’s just that there are too many difficulties and too much awe to submit to the sky, so one pillar after another is erected. Carrying a huge amount of information, it stands in the sunrise and sunset.Compared with them, the pillars of Greece and Rome are too small, not to mention the pillars of Chinese temples and temples. According to historical records, more than 3,000 years ago, when every pharaoh took office, he would come to worship at the Temple of the Sun, and then spend his whole life leaving his own development here.This continued from generation to generation, and the construction process of the Sun Temple lasted for more than a thousand years.

For a long period of history, this was a pilgrimage site for northern and southern Egypt. In its heyday, the number of worshipers in the temple alone exceeded 30,000. A strange phenomenon is that the construction process is so long, but there is no obvious difference between the early stage and the late stage, and there seems to be no great evolution of the old and the new. This just reflects the overall style of ancient Egyptian civilization: it matures as soon as it comes, and it is still it when it leaves.This kind of organism that does not let us understand the growth process is scary.

While rowing on the Nile River in the afternoon, Xu Gehui stared back and forth at the historic sites on both sides of the river and asked: In another thousand years, will there be people who will pay their respects to our civilization today?I say it is very difficult, unless there is a huge disaster. The highest principle of today's civilization is convenience, which makes everything in the world easy to grasp and understand. This principle of convenience is always contrary to the principle of greatness. It is impossible for human beings to abandon convenience for the sake of greatness.Therefore, the charm of these monuments will never be replaced by new things.

But precisely because of this, human beings and monuments encounter two-way pathos: human beings are shallow because they have nothing to admire, and monuments are lonely because of the emptiness behind them.I suddenly remembered the two statues I saw in the field when I left the Valley of the Kings yesterday evening.Sitting tall and dilapidated, so tall that people feel inferior, dilapidated beyond recognition, actually sitting, like an old grandfather who is really exhausted, but his sitting posture is still dignified. There is nothing behind them, only them, leaving the memory of Thebes, the most luxurious capital in the world at that time.

I seem to hear two stone statues muttering: they are gone The two statues are said to be of a single man, Amenhotepal IV, but Europeans call them Memnon.Memnon speaks at sunrise every day, resembling the sound of a harp or a lute being broken.Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke.Later, the Romans came to repair it once, and Memnon stopped talking, only weeping.Experts say that the sound of the stone statue is due to the wind blowing into the cave, and the daily tears are accumulated by dew. Once it is repaired, the cave is blocked, and there is no sound.No matter how you explain it, the huge stone statue that just sheds tears and doesn't speak is touching.

They have seen too many, and all they have to say is that they have all gone.So I simply cried and said nothing more. October 15, 1999, overnight at Emilio Hotel in Luxor