Let us escape quickly, if possible before the sight shall have become graven on our memory.

But alas! even when we are outside, alone again on the expanse of dazzling sands, we can no longer take things seriously.  Abydos and the desert have ceased to exist.  The faces of those women remain to haunt us, their faces and their hats, and those looks which they vouchsafed us from over their solar spectacles. . . .  The ugliness associated with the name of Cook was once explained to me in this wise, and the explanation at first sight seemed satisfactory:  “The United Kingdom, justifiably jealous of the beauty of its daughters, submits them to a jury when they reach the age of puberty; and those who are classed as too ugly to reproduce their kind are accorded an unlimited account at Thomas Cook & Sons, and thus vowed to a course of perpetual travel, which leaves them no time to think of certain trifles incidental to life.”  The explanation, as I say, seduced me for the time being.  But a more attentive examination of the bands who infest the valley of the Nile enables me to aver that all these good English ladies are of an age notoriously canonical; and the catastrophe of procreation therefore, supposing that such an accident could ever have happened to them, must date back to a time long anterior to their enrolment.  And I remain perplexed!

Without conviction now, we make our way towards another temple, guaranteed solitary.  Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again into their folds.

Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II.  But the sands have covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts.  Men in their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins, protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve feet from the ground.  In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders have disappeared with the upper parts of the walls.  But they seem to have preserved their vitality:  the gesticulations, the exaggerated pantomime of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange, more striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained.  And they have preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of their antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow.  It is an artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by remaining perfect after thirty-five centuries.  All that these people did seems as if made for immortality.  It is true, however, that such brilliant colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic monuments, and that here they are heightened by the white background.  For, notwithstanding the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, the walls are all of a fine limestone, of exceeding whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of a pure alabaster.