elics and documents are hidden and guarded by this mosque
of the peristyle! For none would dare to dig in the ground within its
sacred walls.

Gradually the silence of the temple becomes profound. And if the
shortened shadows betray the hour of noon, there is nothing to tell
to what millennium that hour belongs. The silences and middays like
to this, which have passed before the eyes of these giants ambushed in
their colonnades--who could count them?

High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, soar the birds of
prey--and they were there in the times of the Pharaohs, displaying in
the air identical plumages, uttering the same cries. The beasts and
plants, in the course of time, have varied less than men, and remain
unchanged in the smallest details.

Each of the colossi around me--standing there proudly with one leg
advanced as if for a march, heavy and sure, which nothing should
withstand--grasps passionately in his clenched fist, at the end of the
muscular arm, a kind of buckled cross, which in Egypt was the symbol
of eternal life. And this is what the decision of their movement
symbolises: confident all of them in this poor bauble which they hold in
their hand, they cross with a triumphant step the threshold of death.
. . . "Eternal Life"--the thought of immortality--how the human soul has
been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest
strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of
the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and
mediocrity.

The three similar giants, little damaged in the course of their long
existence, who align the eastern side of this courtyard strewn with
blocks, represent, as indeed do all the others, that same Ramses II.,
whose effigy was multiplied so extravagantly at Thebes and Memphis. But
these three have preserved a powerful and impetuous life. They might
have been carved and polished yesterday. Between the monstrous reddish
pillars, they look like white apparitions issuing from their embrasure
of columns and advancing together like soldiers at manoeuvres. The
sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on their heads and strange
headgear, details their everlasting smile, and then sheds itself on
their shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating their athletic
muscles. Each holding in his hand the symbolical cross, the three giants
rush forward with a formidable stride, heads raised, smiling, in a
radiant march into