lmost intact up till the present day.

The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its shifting soil, which
smothers the sound of our steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to
change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if great fires had been
lighted in the neighbourhood.

And this whole domain of light and drought, right away into the
distance, is shaded and streaked with the familiar brown, red and yellow
colours. The mournful reflection of adjacent things augments to excess
the heat and light. The horizon trembles under the little vapours of
mirage like water ruffled by the wind. The background, which mounts
gradually to the foot of the Libyan mountains, is strewn with the debris
of bricks and stones--shapeless ruins which, though they scarcely rise
above the sand, abound nevertheless in great numbers, and serve to
remind us that here indeed is a very ancient soil, where men laboured in
centuries that have drifted out of knowledge. One divines instinctively
and at once the catacombs, the hypogea and the mummies that lie beneath!

These necropoles of Abydos once--and for thousands of years--exercised
an extraordinary fascination over this people--the precursor of
peoples--who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. According to one of the
most ancient of human traditions, the head of Osiris, the lord of the
_other world_, reposed in the depths of one of the temples which to-day
are buried in the sands. And men, as soon as their thought commenced to
issue from the primeval night, were haunted by the idea that there were
localities helpful, as if were, to the poor corpses that lay beneath the
earth, that there were certain holy places where it behoved them to
be buried if they wished to be ready when the signal of awakening was
given. And in old Egypt, therefore, each one, at the hour of death,
turned his thoughts to these stones and sands, in the ardent hope that
he might be able to sleep near the remains of his god. And when the
place was becoming crowded with sleepers, those who could obtain no
place there conceived the idea of having humble obelisks planted on the
holy ground, which at least should tell their names; or even recommended
that their mummies might be there for some weeks, even if they were
afterwards removed. And thus, funeral processions passed to and fro
without ceasing through the cornfields that separate the Nile from
the desert. Abydos! In the sad human dream dominated by the thought of
dissolution, Aby