suddenly burning, and the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined planet which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere.  This Libyan chain, in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now that it overhangs us.  It looks what it is—­an enormous and fantastic tomb, a natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human could equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for ever.  The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from the changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to base, and betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might penetrate into the sepulchres within.  The dead could sleep, therefore, in the heart of these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of lead.  And of what there is of magnificence the centuries have taken care.  The continual passage of winds laden with dust has scaled and worn away the face of the rocks, so as to leave only the denser veins of stone, and thus have reappeared strange architectural fantasies such as Matter, in the beginning, might have dimly conceived.  Subsequently the sun of Egypt has lavished on the whole its ardent reddish patines.  And now the mountains imitate in places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine, and elsewhere huge bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.

Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, the summits, illumined to the point of dazzling, rise up in the light—­like red cinders of a glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that turns almost to darkness.  We seem to be walking in some valley of the Apocalypse with flaming walls.  Silence and death, beneath a transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis—­it was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their necropoles.

The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and at the end of this “Valley of the Kings,” under the sun now nearly meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we expected to come upon a dread silence.  But what is this?

At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking recess, what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean?  Is it a meeting, a fair?  Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand some fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion.  In a corner an electrical workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black smoke, and all about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making a great stir and gabbling to their hearts’ content, are a number of Cook’s tourists of both sexes, and some even who verily seem to have no sex at all.  They are come for the royal audience; some on asses, some in jaunting cars, and some, the stout ladies who are grown short of wind, in chairs carried by the Bedouins.  From the four points of Europe they have assembled in this desert ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at the bottom of a hole.