thousand years ago, under this pure
crystal sky, that the first awakening of human thought began. Our Europe
then was still sleeping, wrapped in the mantle of its damp forests;
sleeping that sleep which still had thousands of years to run. Here, a
precocious humanity, only recently emerged from the Age of Stone, that
earliest form of all, an infant humanity, which saw massively on its
issue from the massiveness of the original matter, conceived and built
terrible sanctuaries for gods, at first dreadful and vague, such as its
nascent reason allowed it to conceive them. Then the first megalithic
blocks were erected; then began that mad heaping up and up, which was
to last nearly fifty centuries; and temples were built above temples,
palaces over palaces, each generation striving to outdo its predecessor
by a more titanic grandeur.

Afterwards, four thousand years ago, Thebes was in the height of her
glory, encumbered with gods and with magnificence, the focus of the
light of the world in the most ancient historic periods; while our
Occident was still asleep and Greece and Assyria were scarcely awakened.
Only in the extreme East, a humanity of a different race, the yellow
people, called to follow in totally different ways, was fixing, so that
they remain even to our day, the oblique lines of its angular roofs and
the rictus of its monsters.

The men of Thebes, if they still saw too massively and too vastly,
at least saw straight; they saw calmly, at the same time as they saw
forever. Their conceptions, which had begun to inspire those of Greece,
were afterwards in some measure to inspire our own. In religion, in art,
in beauty under all its aspects, they were as much our ancestors as were
the Aryans.

Later again, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, in one
of the apogees of the town which, in the course of its interminable
duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings
thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples,
that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the
hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns,
as monstrous as the trunk of the baobab and as high as towers, compared
with which the pillars of our cathedrals are utterly insignificant.
In those days the same gods reigned at Thebes as three thousand years
before, but in the interval they had been transformed little by little
in accordance with the progressive de