their costumes, of their robes of
turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow. It is an
artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by remaining
perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people did seems
as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such brilliant
colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic monuments, and that
here they are heightened by the white background. For, notwithstanding
the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, the walls are all of
a fine limestone, of exceeding whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of
a pure alabaster.

[*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the
neighbourhood, discovering that the limestone of its walls
was friable, used this temple as a quarry, and for some
years bas-reliefs beyond price served as aliment to the
mills of the factory.

Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert
appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow
swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people.
It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the
Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes,
shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the sands
until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line against the sky.
Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand, and that of Seti
in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook & Son flourishes,
there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and pulverised beyond all
possible redemption. But they give us pause, these disappearing ruins,
for they are the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps the head of
the god, the debris of the tombs of the Middle and Ancient Empires, and
they indicate still the wide extent and development of the necropoles
of Abydos, so old that it almost makes one giddy to think of their
beginning.

Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs of the Egyptians are met
with only amongst the sands and the parched rocks. The great ancestral
people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the corruption
of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the midst of
this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call the desert.

*****

And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedo