all save the extreme
points of its obelisks, which keep still a little of their rose-colour.
The feeling comes over you that a sovereign mystery has taken possession
of the town, as if some vague phantom things had just passed into it.

CHAPTER XV

THEBES BY NIGHT

The feeling, almost, that you have grown suddenly smaller by entering
there, that you are dwarfed to less than human size--to such an extent
do the proportions of these ruins seem to crush you--and the illusion,
also, that the light, instead of being extinguished with the evening,
has only changed its colour, and become blue: that is what one
experiences on a clear Egyptian night, in walking between the colonnades
of the great temple at Thebes.

The place is, moreover, so singular and so terrible that its mere name
would at once cast a spell upon the spirit, even if one were ignorant
of the place itself. The hypostyle of the temple of the God Amen--that
could be no other thing but one. For this hall is unique in the world,
in the same way as the Grotto of Fingal and the Himalayas are unique.

*****

To wander absolutely alone at night in Thebes requires during the winter
a certain amount of stratagem and a knowledge of the routine of the
tourists. It is necessary, first of all, to choose a night on which the
moon rises late and then, having entered before the close of the day, to
escape the notice of the Bedouin guards who shut the gates at nightfall.
Thus have I waited with the patience of a stone Osiris, till the grand
transformation scene of the setting of the sun was played out once more
upon the ruins. Thebes, which, during the day, is almost animate by
reason of the presence of the visitors and the gangs of fellahs who,
singing the while, are busy at the diggings and the clearing away of
the rubbish, has emptied itself little by little, while the blue shadows
were mounting from the base of the monstrous sanctuaries. I watched the
people moving in a long row, like a trail of ants, towards the western
gate between the pylons of the Ptolemies, and the last of them had
disappeared before the rosy light died away on the topmost points of the
obelisks.

It seemed as if the silence and the night arrived together from beyond
the Arabian desert, advanced together across the plain, spreading out
like a rapid oil-stain; then gained the town from east to west, and rose
rapidly from the ground to the very summits of the temples. And this
march of the da