iving at the bottom I am received by a row of statues
with battered faces, seated on thrones, and without hindrance of any
kind, and recognising everything in the blue transparency which takes
the place of day, I come to the great avenue of the palaces of Amen.

We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable to this avenue,
which passive multitudes took nearly three thousand years to construct,
expending, century after century, their innumerable energies in carrying
these stones, which our machines now could not move. And the objective
was always the same: to prolong indefinitely the perspectives of pylons,
colossi and obelisks, continuing always this same artery of temples
and palaces in the direction of the old Nile--while the latter, on the
contrary, receded slowly, from century to century, towards Libya. It
is here, and especially at night, that you suffer the feeling of having
been shrunken to the size of a pygmy. All round you rise monoliths
mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty paces to pass the base of a
single one of them. They are placed quite close together, too close,
it seems, in view of their enormity and mass. There is not enough air
between them, and the closeness of their juxtaposition disconcerts you
more, perhaps, even than their massiveness.

The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as
disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes--the hall of the
feasts of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, that this king
gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these ceilings,
of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty men? In
places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost diaphanous in the
air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in unbroken alignment
against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the destruction is bewildering;
fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in
indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered wreckage after a
world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the hand of man should
overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at different times, have
also come to shake this Cyclops palace which threatened to be eternal.
And all this--which represents such an excess of force, of movement,
of impulsion, alike for its erection as for its overthrow--all this is
tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil, although toppling as if for an
imminent downfall--tranquil forever, one might say,