sed through fire. You walk over
blackish scoriae encrusted with brazen bolts and particles of melted
glass. It is the quarter burnt by the soldiers of Cambyses. They were
great destroyers of the queen city, were these same Persian soldiers. To
break up the obelisks and the colossal statues they conceived the plan
of scorching them by lighting bonfires around them, and then, when
they saw them burning hot, they deluged them with cold water. And the
granites cracked from top to base.

It is well known, of course, that Thebes used to extend for a
considerable distance both on this, the right, bank of the Nile, where
the Pharaohs resided, and opposite, on the Libyan bank, given over to
the preparers of mummies and to the mortuary temples. But to-day, except
for the great palaces of the centre, it is little more than a litter
of ruins, and the long avenues, lined with endless rows of sphinxes or
rams, are lost, goodness knows where, buried beneath the sand.

At wide intervals, however, in the midst of these cemeteries of things,
a temple here and there remains upright, preserving still its sanctified
gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, where certain celebrated
oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral
than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall the black hole
of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor coming from the
depths used to lead. It was there that the face of the priest charged
with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared--and the ceiling
of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from the flame of his
lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand years ago!

*****

What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the sand of the desert,
are hereabout! And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange treasures
remain hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn distances, when
you perceive stretching away to the horizon these fields of death, you
realise better what kind of a place this Thebes once was. Rebuilt as
it were in the imagination it appears excessive, superabundant and
multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian world which the fossils
reveal to us. Compared with it how our modern towns are dwarfed, and our
hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old iron!

And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries,
once inhabited by gods and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded
striving of the human soul after