velopment of human thought, and
Amen, the host of this prodigious hall, asserted himself more and more
as the sovereign master of life and eternity. Pharaonic Egypt was really
tending, in spite of some revolts, towards the notion of a divine unity;
even, one might say, to the notion of a supreme pity, for she already
had her Apis, emanating from the All-Powerful, born of a virgin
mother, and come humbly to the earth in order to make acquaintance with
suffering.

After Seti I. and the Ramses had built, in honour of Amen, this temple,
which, beyond all doubt, is the grandest and most durable in the world,
men still continued for another fifteen centuries to heap up in its
neighbourhood those blocks of granite and marble and sandstone, whose
enormity now amazes us. Even for the invaders of Egypt, the Greeks and
Romans, this old ancestral town of towns remained imposing and unique.
They repaired its ruins, and built here temple after temple, in a style
which hardly ever changes. Even in the ages of decadence everything
that raised itself from the old, sacred soil, seemed to be impregnated a
little with the ancient grandeur.

And it was only when the early Christians ruled here, and after them
the Moslem iconoclasts, that the destruction became final. To these new
believers, who, in their simplicity, imagined themselves to be possessed
of the ultimate religious formula and to know by His right name
the great Unknowable, Thebes became the haunt of "false gods," the
abomination of abominations, which it behoved them to destroy.

And so they set to work, penetrating with an ever-present fear into the
profound depths of the gloomy sanctuaries, mutilating first of all the
thousands of visages whose disconcerting smile frightened them, and then
exhausting themselves in the effort to uproot the colossi, which even
with the help of levers, they could not move. It was no easy task
indeed, for everything was as solid as geological masses, as rocks or
promontories. But for five or six hundred years the town was given over
to the caprice of desecrators.

And then came the centuries of silence and oblivion under the shroud of
the desert sands, which, thickening each year, proceeded to bury, and,
in the event, to preserve for us, this peerless relic.

And now, at last, Thebes is being exhumed and restored to a semblance
of life--now, after a cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our
Western humanity, having left the primitive