d not cut them, have kept
their polish despite the lapse of centuries, and my fingers slip in
touching them.

There is now no sound. The music of the night birds has ceased. I listen
in vain--so attentively that I can hear the beating of my heart. Not a
sound, not even the buzzing of a fly. Everything is silent, everything
is ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth of the stones the air
grows colder and colder, and one gets the impression that everything
here is frozen--definitely--as in the coldness of death.

A vast silence reigns, a silence that has subsisted for centuries, on
this same spot, where formerly for three or four thousand years rose
such an uproar of living men. To think of the clamorous multitudes who
once assembled here, of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their
dying agonies. First of all the pantings of those thousands of harnessed
workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation, under the
burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other these stones,
whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts, the music of
the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and
battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world,
an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who
commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and
pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts. To think
of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these
same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny hands now rest, to
think of the beings who have touched them in passing, who have fallen by
their side in last sanguinary conflicts, without rubbing even the polish
from their changeless surfaces!

*****

I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation of
fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold. To find himself in the
dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter. It
seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which
has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very
massiveness, like the mountains. Nothing human is so vast. Nowhere on
earth have men conceived such dwellings. Columns after columns, higher
and more massive than towers, follow one another so closely, in
an excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of
suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses
of s