lete the
task.

And then, what surprises and oppresses you is the want of clear space,
the little room that remained for the multitudes in these halls
which are nevertheless immense. The whole space between the walls was
encumbered with pillars. The temples were half filled with colossal
forests of stone. The men who built Thebes lived in the beginning of
time, and had not yet discovered the thing which to us to-day seems so
simple--namely, the vault. And yet they were marvellous pioneers, these
architects. They had already succeeded in evolving out of the dark, as
it were, a number of conceptions which, from the beginning no doubt,
slumbered in mysterious germ in the human brain--the idea of rectitude,
the straight line, the right angle, the vertical line, of which Nature
furnishes no example, even symmetry, which, if you consider it well, is
less explicable still. They employed symmetry with a consummate mastery,
understanding as well as we do all the effect that is to be obtained by
the repetition of like objects placed _en pendant_ on either side of a
portico or an avenue. But they did not invent the vault. And therefore,
since there was a limit to the size of the stones which they were able
to place flat like beams, they had recourse to this profusion of columns
to support their stupendous ceilings. And thus it is that there seems
to be a want of air, that one seems to stifle in the middle of their
temples, dominated and obstructed as they are by the rigid presence
of so many stones. And yet to-day you can see quite clearly in these
temples, for, since the suspended rocks which served for roof have
fallen, floods of light descend from all parts. But formerly, when a
kind of half night reigned in the deep halls, beneath the immovable
carapaces of sandstone or granite, how oppressive and sepulchral it must
all have been--how final and pitiless, like a gigantic palace of Death!
On one day, however, in each year, here at Thebes, a light as of
a conflagration used to penetrate from one end to the other of
the sanctuaries of Amen; for the middle artery is open towards the
north-west, and is aligned in such a fashion that, once a year, one
solitary time, on the evening of the summer solstice, the sun as it sets
is able to plunge its reddened rays straight into the sanctuaries. At
the moment when it enlarges its blood-coloured disc before descending
behind the desolation of the Libyan mountains, it arrives in the very
axi