And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, become gradually distinct.  Of the same height and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they rise side by side in the clear distance in the midst of these green plains, which recall so well our fields of France.  They wear the headgear of the Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms seated on thrones—­the colossal statues of Memnon.  We recognise them at once, for the picture-makers of succeeding ages have popularised their aspect, as in the case of the pyramids.  What is strange is that they should stand there so simply in the midst of these fields of growing corn, which reach to their very feet, and be surrounded by these humble birds we know so well, who sing without ceremony on their shoulders.

They do not seem to be scandalised even at seeing now, passing quite close to them, the trucks of a playful little railway belonging to a local industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and gourds.

The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has been growing gradually larger against the profound and excessively blue sky.  And now that it rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it were incandescent, under this ten o’clock sun, we begin to see on all sides, in front of the first rocky spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces, colonnades, staircases and pylons.  Headless giants, swathed like dead Pharaohs, stand upright, with hands crossed beneath their shroud of sandstone.  They are the temples and statues for the manes of numberless kings and queens, who during three or four thousand years had their mummies buried hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the deepest of the walled and secret galleries.

And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any herbage—­nothing.  We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the desert, and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand, half ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes.  It looks like some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts.  But it is men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground, first to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to exhume them.  Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you peer within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago.  Some lean Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.

And now farewell to the fresh morning.  Every minute the heat becomes more oppressive.  The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical passage.  We enter now into that “Valley of the Kings” which was the place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies.  The breaths of air that reach us between these rocks are become