French, German, English; I see them below, a lot of pygmy figures, issuing from the hypostyle hall, and making their way towards us.  Mean and pitiful they look in their twentieth-century travellers’ costumes, hurrying along that avenue where once defiled so many processions of gods and goddesses.  And yet this, perhaps, is the only occasion on which one of these bands of tourists does not seem to me altogether ridiculous.  Amongst these groups of unknown people, there is none who is not collected and thoughtful, or who does not at least pretend to be so; and there is some saving quality of grace, even some grandeur of humility, in the sentiment which has brought them to this town of Amen, and in the homage of their silence.

We are so high on this portal that we might fancy ourselves upon a tower, and the defaced stones of which it is built are immeasurably large.  Instinctively each one sits with his face to the glowing sun, and consequently to the outspread distances of the fields and the desert.

Before us, under our feet, an avenue stretches away, prolonging towards the fields the pomp of the dead city—­an avenue bordered by monstrous rams, larger than buffaloes, all crouched on their pedestals in two parallel rows in the traditional hieratic pose.  The avenue terminates beyond at a kind of wharf or landing-stage which formerly gave on to the Nile.  It was there that the God Amen, carried and followed by long trains of priests, came every year to take his golden barge for a solemn procession.  But it leads to-day only to the cornfields, for, in the course of successive centuries, the river has receded little by little and now winds its course a thousand yards away in the direction of Libya.

We can see, beyond, the old sacred Nile between the clusters of palm-trees on its banks; meandering there like a rosy pathway, which remains, nevertheless, in this hour of universal incandescence, astonishingly pale, and gleams occasionally with a bluish light.  And on the farther bank, from one end to the other of the western horizon, stretches the chain of the Libyan mountains behind which the sun is about to plunge; a chain of red sandstone, parched since the beginning of the world—­without a rival in the preservation to perpetuity of dead bodies—­which the Thebans perforated to its extreme depths to fill it with sarcophagi.

We watch the sun descend.  But we turn also to see, behind us, the ruins in this the traditional moment of their apotheosis.  Thebes, the immense town-mummy, seems all at once to be ablaze—­as if its old stones were able still to burn; all its blocks, fallen or upright, appear to have been suddenly made ruddy by the glow of fire.

On this side, too, the view embraces great peaceful distances.  Past the last pylons, and beyond the crumbling ramparts the country, down there behind the town, presents the same appearance as that we were facing a moment before.  The same cornfields, the same woods of date-trees, that make a girdle of green palms around the ruins.  And, right in the background, a chain of mountains is lit up and glows with a vivid coral colour.  It is the chain of the Arabian desert, lying parallel to that of Libya, along the whole length of the Nile Valley—­which is thus guarded on right and left by stones and sand stretched out in profound solitudes.