And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling remains of a gigantic skeleton.  They seem to be begging for a merciful surcease, as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each setting of the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.

All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.  The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer.  His attitude moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban statues.  With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary mortal who had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days—­for many days and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the transparency of these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined in the distance under the dim light of the stars—­a great phantom in his contemplative pose.  And I feel myself obsessed now by the continuance of his attitude at this entrance of the ruins—­I who shall pass without a morrow from Thebes and even from the earth—­even as we all pass.  Before conscious life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had been there since times which make you shudder to think upon.  For three and thirty centuries, or thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown men and women, who have gone before me, saw him just as I see him now, tranquil and white, in this same place, seated before this same threshold, with his head a little bent, and his pervading air of thought.

[*] Statue of Amenophis III.

I make my way without hastening, having always a tendency to stop and look behind me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the white dreamer, which now are all illumined with a last Bengal fire in the daily setting of the sun.

And the hour is already twilight when I reach the goddesses.

Their domain is so destroyed that the sands had succeeded in covering and hiding it for centuries.  But it has lately been exhumed.

There remain of it now only some fragments of columns, aligned in multiple rows in a vast extent of desert.  Broken and fallen stones and debris.[*] I walk on without stopping, and at length reach the sacred lake on the margin of which the great cats are seated in eternal council, each one on her throne.  The lake, dug by order of the Pharaohs, is in the form of an arc, like a kind of crescent.  Some marsh birds, that are about to retire for the night, now traverse its mournful, sleeping water.  Its borders, which have known the utmost of magnificence, are become mere heaps of ruins on which nothing grows.  And what one sees beyond, what the attentive goddesses themselves regard, is the empty desolate plain, on which some few poor fields of corn mingle in this twilight hour with the sad infinitude of the sands.  And the whole is bounded on the horizon by the chain, still a little rose-coloured, of the limestones of Arabia.