Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again into their folds.
Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II.

But the sands have covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts.

Men in their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins, protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve feet from the ground.

In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders have disappeared with the upper parts of the walls.

But they seem to have preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated pantomime of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange, more striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained.