pharaoh acknowledges and before which he the erpatr must bend himself.

Night had fallen. Ramses commanded his servants to admit no one, and
walked in loneliness on the terrace of his villa, thinking,

"A wonderful thing! Down there at Pi-Bailos the invincible regiments of
Nitager opened before me, while in Memphis an overseer of prisons, an
investigating official, and a scribe bar the way to me. What are they?
Mere servants of my father, may he live through eternity! who can cast
them down to the rank of slaves at any moment and send them to the
quarries. But why should not my father pardon the innocent? The state
does not wish him to do so. And what is the state? Does it eat? where
does it sleep? where are its hands and its sword, of which all are in
terror?"

He looked into the garden, and among the trees on the summit of an
eminence he saw two immense silhouettes of pylons, on which sentry
lights were burning. The thought came to him that that watch never
slept, those pylons never ate, but still they existed. Those pylons had
existed for ages, mighty, like Ramses the Great, that potentate who had
reared them.

Could he lift those edifices and hundreds of similar grandeur; could he
escape those guards and thousands of others who watch over the safety
of Egypt; could he disobey laws established by Ramses the Great and
other preceding pharaohs still greater, laws which twenty dynasties had
consecrated by their reverence?

In the soul of the prince for the first time in life a certain idea,
dim but gigantic, began to fix itself in outline, the idea of the
state. The state is something more magnificent than the temple in
Thebes, something grander than the pyramid of Cheops, something more
ancient than the subterranean temple of the Sphinx, something more
enduring than granite in that immense though invisible edifice people
are like ants in some cranny of a cliff, and the pharaoh a mere
traveling architect who is barely able to lay one stone in the wall of
the edifice and then go on farther. But the walls increase from
generation to generation and the edifice continues.

He, the son of the pharaoh, had never felt yet his littleness as in
that moment, when his glance in the midst of the night was wandering
beyond the Nile among pylons of the pharaoh's palace, and the
indefinite but imposing outlines of the Memphis temples.

At that moment from among the trees whose branches touched the terrace,
he heard a voice.