has lately been exhumed.

There remain of it now only some fragments of columns, aligned in
multiple rows in a vast extent of desert. Broken and fallen stones and
debris.[*] I walk on without stopping, and at length reach the sacred
lake on the margin of which the great cats are seated in eternal
council, each one on her throne. The lake, dug by order of the Pharaohs,
is in the form of an arc, like a kind of crescent. Some marsh birds,
that are about to retire for the night, now traverse its mournful,
sleeping water. Its borders, which have known the utmost of
magnificence, are become mere heaps of ruins on which nothing grows. And
what one sees beyond, what the attentive goddesses themselves regard, is
the empty desolate plain, on which some few poor fields of corn mingle
in this twilight hour with the sad infinitude of the sands. And
the whole is bounded on the horizon by the chain, still a little
rose-coloured, of the limestones of Arabia.

[*] The temple of the Goddess Mut.

They are there, the cats, or, to speak more exactly, the lionesses, for
cats would not have those short ears, or those cruel chins, thickened
by tufts of beard. All of black granite, images of Sekhet (who was the
Goddess of War, and in her hours the Goddess of Lust), they have the
slender body of a woman, which makes more terrible the great feline head
surmounted by its high bonnet. Eight or ten, or perhaps more, they are
more disquieting in that they are so numerous and so alike. They are
not gigantic, as one might have expected, but of ordinary human
stature--easy therefore to carry away, or to destroy, and that again, if
one reflects, augments the singular impression they cause. When so many
colossal figures lie in pieces on the ground, how comes it that they,
little people seated so tranquilly on their chairs, have contrived to
remain intact, during the passing of the three and thirty centuries of
the world's history?

The passage of the march birds, which for a moment disturbed the clear
mirror of the lake, has ceased. Around the goddesses nothing moves and
the customary infinite silence envelops them as at the fall of every
night. They dwell indeed in such a forlorn corner of the ruins! Who, to
be sure, even in broad daylight, would think of visiting them?

Down there in the west a trailing cloud of dust indicates the departure
of the tourists, who had flocked to the temple of Amen, and now hasten
back to Luxor, to dine at the variou