Last night we went to the temple of Luxor, which was one of the coolest places we've been to since we got here. We'd finally made it to a proper "old old" temple (even though, I think, it was "New Kingdom"), not the "new old" of the Greek/Roman (Ptolemaic?) era temples we saw earlier in the day. The pillars were swollen at the bottom and capped with closed lotuses; the heiroglyphs were more angular and energetic, somehow. In front were giant statues carved from single blocks of granite, as was the obelisk (twin of the one at Place de la Concorde). Oddly, there was a (thousand year old) mosque tucked inside behind the left front wall. In the back, behind a Roman emperor cult building, were series of carvings of sacrifices: bound ibex, oryx, cattle; and scenes featuring the one-armed god of fertility, whose "member" was burnished by the many hands of women hoping to get pregnant. The thousand year difference between this temple and the ones we'd seen earlier were noticable; it [text lost here, need to add in later]
was old, at night. I just wish we could go back today and sketch for a while ...
