tone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to
advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally
small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows
preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful
ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is
cold and clear and blue.

The central bay of this hypostyle is in the same line as the road I
have been following since I left the hall of Thothmes. It prolongs and
magnifies as in an apotheosis that same long avenue, for the gods and
kings, which was the glory of Thebes, and which in the succession of the
ages nothing has contrived to equal. The columns which border it are
so gigantic[*] that their tops, formed of mysterious full-blown petals,
high up above the ground on which we crawl, are completely bathed in the
diffuse clearness of the sky. And enclosing this kind of nave on either
side, like a terrible forest, is another mass of columns--monster
columns, of an earlier style, of which the capitals close instead of
opening, imitating the buds of some flower which will never blossom.
Sixty to the right, sixty to the left, too close together for their
size, they grow thick like a forest of baobabs that wanted space: they
induce a feeling of oppression without possible deliverance, of massive
and mournful eternity.

[*] About 30 feet in circumference and 75 feet in height
including the capital.

And this, forsooth, was the place that I had wished to traverse alone,
without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to
follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light
even, for a blue phosphorescence, coming from the eastern horizon,
begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right,
outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings on
their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours of solitude are
nearly over.

*****

The moon! Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the formidable
friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and there, on the
bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous trails which reveal
the gods and goddesses engraved in the stone. They were watching in
myriads around me, as I knew well,--coifed, all of them, in discs or
great horns. They stare at one another with their arms raised, spreading
out their long fingers in an eager attempt at conversation. They a