to ask for mercy: "Yes, yes, my sepulchre has
been violated and I am returning to dust. But now that you have seen me,
leave me, turn out that light, have pity on my nothingness."

In sooth, what a mockery! To have taken so many pains, to have adopted
so many stratagems to hide his corpse; to have exhausted thousands of
men in the hewing of this underground labyrinth, and to end thus, with
his head in the glare of an electric lamp, to amuse whoever passes.

And out of pity--I think it was the poor bouquet of mimosa that awakened
it--I say to the Bedouin: "Yes, put out the light, put it out--that is
enough."

And then the darkness returns above the royal countenance, which is
suddenly effaced in the sarcophagus. The phantom of the Pharaoh is
vanished, as if replunged into the unfathomable past. The audience is
over.

And we, who are able to escape from the horror of the hypogeum, reascend
rapidly towards the sunshine of the living, we go to breathe the air
again, the air to which we have still a right--for some few days longer.

CHAPTER XVIII

AT THEBES IN THE TEMPLE OF THE OGRESS

This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins--at the hour in which the
light of the sun begins to turn to rose--I make my way along one of the
magnificent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, which goes off at a
right angle to the line of the temples of Amen, and, losing itself more
or less in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on the border of
which certain cat-headed goddesses are seated in state watching the
dead water and the expanse of the desert. This particular road was
begun three thousand four hundred years ago by a beautiful queen called
Makeri,[*] and in the following centuries a number of kings
continued its construction. It was ornamented with pylons of a superb
massiveness--pylons are monumental walls, in the form of a trapezium
with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, which the Egyptians
used to place at either side of their porticoes and long avenues--as
well as by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams, larger than
buffaloes, crouched on pedestals.

[*] To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo.

At the first pylons I have to make a detour. They are so ruinous that
their blocks, fallen down on all sides, have closed the passage. Here
used to watch, on right and left, two upright giants of red granite from
Syene. Long ago in times no longer precisely known, they were broken