rkness was infinitely solemn.

For the first few moments, indeed, you might imagine that it was going
to be an ordinary night such as we know in our climate, and a sense of
uneasiness takes hold of you in the midst of this confusion of enormous
stones, which in the darkness would become a quite inextricable maze.
Oh! the horror of being lost in those ruins of Thebes and not being able
to see! But in the event the air preserved its transparency to such a
degree, and the stars began soon to scintillate so brightly that the
surrounding things could be distinguished almost as well as in the
daytime.

Indeed, now that the time of transition between the day and night
has passed, the eyes grow accustomed to the strange, blue, persistent
clearness so that you seem suddenly to have acquired the pupils of a
cat; and the ultimate effect is merely as if you saw through a smoked
glass which changed all the various shades of this reddish-coloured
country into one uniform tint of blue.

Behold me then, for some two or three hours, alone among the temples of
the Pharaohs. The tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at this
moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return till very
late, when the full moon will have risen and be shedding its clear light
upon the ruins. My post, while I waited, was high up among the ruins on
the margin of the sacred Lake of Osiris, the still and enclosed water
of which is astonishing in that it has remained there for so many
centuries. It still conceals, no doubt, numberless treasures confided
to it in the days of slaughters and pillages, when the armies of the
Persian and Nubian kings forced the thick, surrounding walls.

In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at the bottom of this
water, reflecting symmetrically the veritable ones which now scintillate
everywhere in the heavens. A sudden cold spreads over the town-mummy,
whose stones, still warm from their exposure to the sun, cool very
rapidly in this nocturnal blue which envelops them as in a shroud. I
am free to wander where I please without risk of meeting anyone, and I
begin to descend by the steps made by the falling of the granite blocks,
which have formed on all sides staircases as if for giants. On the
overturned surfaces, my hands encounter the deep, clear-cut hollows of
the hieroglyphs, and sometimes of those inevitable people, carved
in profile, who raise their arms, all of them, and make signs to one
another. On arr