Through the green crops and the assembled herds our pathway seems to lead to a kind of hill rising alone in the midst of the plains—­a hill which is neither of the same colour nor the same nature as the mountains of the surrounding deserts.  Behind us the portico recedes little by little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as mournful and solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of meadows, which spread their peace where once was a centre of magnificence.

The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts—­the wind of Egypt that never seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of the sun.  The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its young quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one another and turn their backs to the squall.

As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of ruins.  And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red.  They are the remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here for some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of time in the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become in time mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and sometimes even in the submerging sands.

A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses; a heap of broken jars or amphorae—­myriads of them—­that served to carry the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of walls, repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with hieroglyphs lie upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or Coptic sculptures or Roman capitals.  In our countries, where the past is of yesterday, we have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead things.

Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on all sides like a jealous rampart.  Until recently indeed they covered it almost to its roof.  From the very first its appearance is disconcerting:  it is so grand, so austere and gloomy.  A strange dwelling, to be sure, for the Goddess of Love and Joy.  It seems more fit to be the home of the Prince of Darkness and of Death.  A severe doorway, built of gigantic stones and surmounted by a winged disc, opens on to an asylum of religious mystery, on to depths where massive columns disappear in the darkness of deep night.

Immediately on entering there is a coolness and a resonance as of a sepulchre.  First, the pronaos, where we still see clearly, between pillars carved with hieroglyphs.  Were it not for the large human faces which serve for the capitals of the columns, and are the image of the lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this temple of the decadent epoch would scarcely differ from those built in this country two thousand years before.  It has the same square massiveness.

And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands—­eternally the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere—­in the palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri of the mummies.