t now more clearly against the clouds
on the horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the silhouettes of those
eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things which rise here and
there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost intact and preserving
still their sharp point. To-day they are the only landmarks of this
necropolis, which is nearly six miles in length, and was formerly
covered by temples of a magnificence and a vastness unimaginable to the
minds of our day. Except for one which is quite near us (the fantastic
grandfather of the others, that of King Zoser, who died nearly
5000 years ago), except for this one, which is made of six colossal
superposed terraces, they are all built after that same conception of
the _Triangle_, which is at once the most mysteriously simple figure
of geometry, and the strongest and most permanently stable form of
architecture. And now that there remains no trace of the frescoed
portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their multicoloured coatings,
now that they have taken on the same dead colour as the desert, they
look like the huge bones of giant fossils, that have long outlasted
their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath the ground, however, the
case is different; there, still remain the bodies of men, and even
of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw these vast structures
building, and who sleep intact, swathed in bandages, in the darkness
of their tunnels. _We know_, for we have penetrated there before, what
things are hidden in the womb of this old desert, on which the yellow
shroud of the sand grows thicker and thicker as the centuries pass.
The whole deep rock had been perforated patiently to make hypogea and
sepulchral chambers, great and small, and veritable palaces for the
dead, adorned with innumerable painted figures. And though now, for
some two thousand years, men have set themselves furiously to exhume
the sarcophagi and the treasures that are buried here, the subterranean
reserves are not yet exhausted. There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of
undisturbed sleepers, who will never be discovered.

As we advance the wind grows stronger and colder beneath a sky that
becomes increasingly cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The
sand is the undisputed sovereign of the necropolis; if it does not surge
and roll like some enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when seen
from the green valley below, it nevertheless covers everything with an
obstinate per