each minute more rose-coloured, I see, gradually mounting in proportion
as I move away from it, the great mass of the palaces of the centre,
the hypostyle hall, the halls of Thothmes and the obelisks, all the
entangled cluster of those things at once so grand and so dead, which
have never been equalled on earth.

And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy
apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling remains
of a gigantic skeleton. They seem to be begging for a merciful surcease,
as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each setting of
the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.

All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the
outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples
and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.
The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now
reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer. His attitude
moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban statues.
With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary mortal who
had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days--for many days
and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the transparency of
these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined in the distance
under the dim light of the stars--a great phantom in his contemplative
pose. And I feel myself obsessed now by the continuance of his attitude
at this entrance of the ruins--I who shall pass without a morrow from
Thebes and even from the earth--even as we all pass. Before conscious
life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had been there since times
which make you shudder to think upon. For three and thirty centuries, or
thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown men and women, who have gone
before me, saw him just as I see him now, tranquil and white, in this
same place, seated before this same threshold, with his head a little
bent, and his pervading air of thought.

[*] Statue of Amenophis III.

I make my way without hastening, having always a tendency to stop
and look behind me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the white
dreamer, which now are all illumined with a last Bengal fire in the
daily setting of the sun.

And the hour is already twilight when I reach the goddesses.

Their domain is so destroyed that the sands had succeeded in covering
and hiding it for centuries. But it