The Project Gutenberg EBook of Egypt (La Mort De Philae), by Pierre Loti

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Title: Egypt (La Mort De Philae)

Author: Pierre Loti

Translator: W. P. Baines

Release Date: April 12, 2006 [EBook #3685]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Dagny; John Bickers

EGYPT (LA MORT DE PHILAE)

by Pierre Loti

Translated from the French by

W. P. Baines

CHAPTER I

A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE GREAT SPHINX

A night wondrously clear and of a colour unknown to our climate; a place
of dreamlike aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a bright silver,
which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely is no
longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in other
lands. A world in which everything is suffused with rosy color beneath
the stars of midnight, and where granite symbols rise up, ghostlike and
motionless.

Is that a hill of sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for it
has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy
cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised itself
there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this
kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured
too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and
smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast
by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster
face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined and gently
undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the sky,
those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures of geometry, but
so vast in the distance that they inspire you with fear. They seem to be
luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand out in their clear
rose against the deep blue of the star-spangled vault. And this apparent
radiation from within, by its lack of likelihood, makes them seem more
awful.

And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.
Nothing else is to be seen anywhere save those three awful things that
stand there upright a