the Unknowable is as it were petrified
in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand. And subsisting
thus down to our day it puts us to shame. Compared with this people, who
thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful dotards, who soon will
be past caring about the wherefore of life, or thought, or death. Such
beginnings presaged, surely, something greater than our humanity of the
present day, given over to despair, to alcohol and to explosives!

*****

Crumbling and dust! This same sun of Thebes is in its place each day,
parching, exhausting, cracking and pulverising.

On the ground where once stood so much magnificence there are fields
of corn, spread out like green carpets, which tell of the return of the
humble life of tillage. Above all, there is the sand, encroaching now
upon the very threshold of the Pharaohs; there is the yellow desert;
there is the world of reflections and of silence, which approaches like
a slow submerging tide. In the distance, where the mirage trembles from
morning till evening, the burying is already almost achieved. The few
poor stones which still appear, barely emerging from the advancing
dunes, are the remains of what men, in their superb revolts against
death, had contrived to make the most massively indestructible.

And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades over Thebes the irony of
its duration--for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive! Nowhere
so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing that all
our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of fermentation
round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire, and that that
fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an ephemeral meteor,
a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the innumerable cosmic
transformations, in the course of times without end and without
beginning.

CHAPTER XVII

AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.

King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd years,
by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court dress
is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not above
taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from eight
o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and if he
rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only because, as
soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.

Happy Ame