The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes—­the hall of the feasts of Thothmes III.  What kind of feasts were they, that this king gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these ceilings, of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty men?  In places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost diaphanous in the air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in unbroken alignment against the star-strewn sky.  Elsewhere the destruction is bewildering; fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered wreckage after a world-wide tempest.  For it was not enough that the hand of man should overturn these things.  Tremblings of the earth, at different times, have also come to shake this Cyclops palace which threatened to be eternal.  And all this—­which represents such an excess of force, of movement, of impulsion, alike for its erection as for its overthrow—­all this is tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil, although toppling as if for an imminent downfall—­tranquil forever, one might say, congealed by the cold and by the night.

I was prepared for silence in such a place, but not for the sounds which I commence to hear.  First of all an osprey sounds the prelude, above my head and so close to me that it holds me trembling throughout its long cry.  Then other voices answer from the depths of the ruins, voices very diverse, but all sinister.  Some are only able to mew on two long-drawn notes:  some yelp like jackals round a cemetery, and others again imitate the sound of a steel spring slowly unwinding itself.  And this concert comes always from above.  Owls, ospreys, screech-owls, all the different kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and round eyes, and silken wings that enable them to fly noiselessly, have their homes amongst the granites massively upheld in the air; and they are celebrating now, each after its own fashion, the nocturnal festival.  Intermittent calls break upon the air, and long-drawn infinitely mournful wailings, that sometimes swell and sometimes seem to be strangled and end in a kind of sob.  And then, in spite of the sonority of the vast straight walls, in spite of the echoes which prolong the cries, the silence obstinately returns.  Silence.  The silence after all and beyond all doubt is the true master at this hour of this kingdom at once colossal, motionless and blue—­a silence that seems to be infinite, because we know that there is nothing around these ruins, nothing but the line of the dead sands, the threshold of the deserts.

*****