The god Amen himself, the procreator, drawn often with an absolute crudity, would seem chaste compared with the hosts of this temple.

For here, on the contrary, the figures might be those of living people, palpitating and voluptuous, who had posed themselves for sport in these consecrated attitudes.

The throat of the beautiful goddess, her hips, her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with a searching and lingering realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver.
She and her spouse, the beautiful Horus, son of Iris, contemplate each other, naked, one before the other, and their laughing eyes are intoxicated with love.
Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and massive as so many fortresses.

They were used formerly for mysterious and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs.

Bats are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted in fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the neighbouring fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that they hang like stalactites.
Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great roofs of the temple--staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls.