wice its height,
rises the impudent Winter Palace, that monster hotel built last year
for the fastidious tourists. And yet, who knows? The jackanapes who
deposited this abomination on the sacred soil of Egypt perhaps imagines
that he equals the merit of the artist who is now restoring the
sanctuaries of Thebes, or even the glory of the Pharaohs who built them.

As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, where this king awaits us, we
traverse fields still green with growing corn--and sparrows and larks
sing around us in the impetuous spring of this land of Thebes.

And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, become gradually distinct. Of
the same height and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they rise side
by side in the clear distance in the midst of these green plains, which
recall so well our fields of France. They wear the headgear of the
Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms seated on thrones--the colossal
statues of Memnon. We recognise them at once, for the picture-makers
of succeeding ages have popularised their aspect, as in the case of the
pyramids. What is strange is that they should stand there so simply in
the midst of these fields of growing corn, which reach to their very
feet, and be surrounded by these humble birds we know so well, who sing
without ceremony on their shoulders.

They do not seem to be scandalised even at seeing now, passing quite
close to them, the trucks of a playful little railway belonging to a
local industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and gourds.

The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has been growing gradually
larger against the profound and excessively blue sky. And now that it
rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it were incandescent,
under this ten o'clock sun, we begin to see on all sides, in front
of the first rocky spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces,
colonnades, staircases and pylons. Headless giants, swathed like dead
Pharaohs, stand upright, with hands crossed beneath their shroud of
sandstone. They are the temples and statues for the manes of numberless
kings and queens, who during three or four thousand years had their
mummies buried hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the deepest of
the walled and secret galleries.

And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any
herbage--nothing. We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the
desert, and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand,
half ashes, that is p