ght. Not rocks, but architectural masses, tremendous and
superhuman, placed there in attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And
out of them rise the points of two obelisks, sharp as the blade of a
lance. And then, at once, I understand--Thebes!

Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the shadow and I did not know it
was so near. But Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the world
could produce such an apparition. And I salute with a kind of shudder
of respect this unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted me for many
years, but which until now life had not left me time to visit.

And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of
the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we
must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace which
the rising sun has just disclosed to us.

And while my equipage of bronze--intoning that song, as old as Egypt
and everlastingly the same, which seems to help the men in their arduous
work--is busy unfastening the chain which binds us to the bank, I
continue to watch the distant apparition. It emerges gradually from the
light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger than it is.
The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in detail; and reveals
it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the midst of a silent plain,
on the yellow carpet of the desert. And how this sun, rising in its
clear splendour, seems to crush it with its youth and stupendous
duration. This same sun had attained to its present round form, had
acquired the clear precision of its disc, and begun its daily promenade
over the country of the sands, countless centuries of centuries, before
it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town of Thebes arise; an
attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies
a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have
not been able even to equal. And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and
derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four
negligible thousands of years.

*****

An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what a surprise awaits us there!

The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six
miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has
grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal hotel,
obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of iron. Twice
or three times as high as