se most deeply rooted in their hearts and their
ancestral past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing of all our
positive notions: to know that there will be a _last_ of all things,
not only a last temple, and a last priest, but a last birth of a human
child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . .

*****

In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew outside,
and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of horror that
were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind. Sinister as it is
under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely intolerable to look
upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the daylight fails.

On our return to it, from the subterranean darkness, everything in its
dead immensity has begun to take on the blue tint of the night. On the
top of the sandhills, of which the yellow colour has greatly paled since
we went below, the wind amuses itself by raising little vortices of sand
that imitate the spray of an angry sea. On all sides dark clouds stretch
themselves as at the moment of our descent. The horizon detaches itself
more and more clearly from them, and, farther towards the east, it
actually seems to be tilted up; one of the highest of the waves of this
waterless sea, a mountain of sand whose soft contours are deceptive in
the distance, makes it look as if it sloped towards us, so as almost to
produce a sensation of vertigo. The sun itself has deigned to remain on
the scene a few seconds longer, held beyond its time by the effect of
mirage; but it is so changed behind its thick veils that we would prefer
that it should not be there. Of the colour of dying embers, it seems
too near and too large; it has ceased to give any light, and is become a
mere rose-coloured globe, that is losing its shape and becoming oval.
No longer in the free heavens, but stranded there on the extreme edge of
the desert, it watches the scene like a large dull eye, about to close
itself in death. And the mysterious superhuman triangles, they too, of
course, are there, waiting for us on our return from underground, some
near, some far, posted in their eternal places; but surely they have
grown gradually more blue. . . .

Such a night, in such a place, it seems the _last_ night.

CHAPTER VII

THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO

Night. A long straight road, the artery of some capital, through which
our carriage drives at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the
pavement. Electric light everywhe