I retrace my steps towards the west in the direction of the hypostyle, traversing again the avenue of monstrous splendours, imprisoned and, as it were, dwarfed between the rows of sovereign stones.  There are obelisks there, some upright, some overthrown.  One like those of Luxor, but much higher, remains intact and raises its sharp point into the sky; others, less well known in their exquisite simplicity, are quite plain and straight from base to summit, bearing only in relief gigantic lotus flowers, whose long climbing stems bloom above in the half light cast by the stars.  The passage becomes narrower and more obscure, and it is necessary sometimes to grope my way.  And then again my hands encounter the everlasting hieroglyphs carved everywhere, and sometimes the legs of a colossus seated on its throne.  The stones are still slightly warm, so fierce has been the heat of the sun during the day.  And certain of the granites, so hard that our steel chisels could not cut them, have kept their polish despite the lapse of centuries, and my fingers slip in touching them.

There is now no sound.  The music of the night birds has ceased.  I listen in vain—­so attentively that I can hear the beating of my heart.  Not a sound, not even the buzzing of a fly.  Everything is silent, everything is ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth of the stones the air grows colder and colder, and one gets the impression that everything here is frozen—­definitely—­as in the coldness of death.

A vast silence reigns, a silence that has subsisted for centuries, on this same spot, where formerly for three or four thousand years rose such an uproar of living men.  To think of the clamorous multitudes who once assembled here, of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their dying agonies.  First of all the pantings of those thousands of harnessed workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation, under the burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other these stones, whose enormity now amazes us.  And the prodigious feasts, the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts.  To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue!  And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny hands now rest, to think of the beings who have touched them in passing, who have fallen by their side in last sanguinary conflicts, without rubbing even the polish from their changeless surfaces!

*****