sistence which has continued since the beginning of time.
Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable statues and colossi and
temples of the Sphinx. It comes without a pause, from Libya, from the
great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the universe. It harmonises
well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids, which form immutable rocks
on its always shifting extent; and if one thinks of it, it gives a more
thrilling sense of anterior eternities even than all these Egyptian
ruins, which, in comparison with it, are things of yesterday. The
sand--the sand of the primitive seas--which represents a labour of
erosion of a duration impossible to conceive, and bears witness to a
continuity of destruction which, one might say, had no beginning.

Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and
half buried in sand, at which we have to stop. It was once the house
of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still shelters the director of the
excavations, from whom we have to obtain permission to descend amongst
the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered
with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The
parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two clouds,
enter through a window opening on to the surrounding desolation; and the
light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and the evening.

The master of the house, while his Bedouin servants are gone to open and
light up for us the underground habitations of the Apis, shows us his
latest astonishing find, made this morning in a hypogeum of one of the
most ancient dynasties. It is there on a table, a group of little people
of wood, of the size of the marionettes of our theatres. And since it
was the custom to put in a tomb only those figures or objects which were
most pleasing to him who dwelt in it, the man-mummy to whom this toy
was offered in times anterior to all precise chronology must have been
extremely partial to dancing-girls. In the middle of the group the man
himself is represented, sitting in an armchair, and on his knee he holds
his favourite dancing-girl. Other girls posture before him in a dance
of the period; and on the ground sit musicians touching tambourines and
strangely fashioned harps. All wear their hair in a long plait, which
falls below their shoulders like the pigtail of the Chinese. It was
the distinguishing mark of these kinds of courtesans. And these little
people had kept th