s there like the carcass of a
gigantic beast that has been dead for thousands of years, but is too
massive ever to be annihilated.

In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade behind the monstrous
pillars, but even that shade is dusty and hot. The columns too are hot,
and so are all the blocks--and yet it is winter and the nights are cold,
even to the point of frost. Heat and dust; a reddish dust, which hangs
like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper Egypt, exhaling an odour
of spices and mummy.

The great heat seems to augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue
which seizes you as you regard these stones--too heavy for human
strength--which are massed here in mountains. One almost seems to
participate in the efforts, the exhaustions and the sweating toils of
that people, with their muscles of brand new steel, who in the carrying
and piling of such masses had to bear the yoke for thirty centuries.

Even the stones themselves tell of fatigue--the fatigue of being crushed
by one another's weight for thousands of years; the suffering that comes
of having been too exactly carved, and too nicely placed one above the
other, so that they seem to be riveted together by the force of their
mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the base that bear the weight of
these awful pilings!

And the ardent colour of these things surprises you. It has persisted.
On the red sandstone of the hypostyle, the paintings of more than three
thousand years ago are still to be seen; especially above the central
chamber, almost in the sky, the capitals, in the form of great flowers,
have kept the lapis blues, the greens and yellows with which their
strange petals were long ago bespeckled.

Decrepitude and crumbling and dust. In broad daylight, under the
magnificent splendour of the life-giving sun, one realises clearly that
all here is dead, and dead since days which the imagination is scarcely
able to conceive. And the ruin appears utterly irreparable. Here and
there are a few impotent and almost infantine attempts at reparation,
undertaken in the ancient epochs of history by the Greeks and Romans.
Columns have been put together, holes have been filled with cement. But
the great blocks lie in confusion, and one feels, even to the point of
despair, how impossible it is ever to restore to order such a chaos of
crushing, overthrown things--even with the help of legions of workers
and machines, and with centuries before you in which to comp