It knew not the dull days and the humidity under which we suffer, but kept always the changeless sky of the immense surrounding deserts, which exhaled no vapour that might dim the horizon.

It was this eternal splendour of its light, no doubt, and this easiness of life, which brought forth here the first fruits of human thought.

This same Nile, after having so patiently created the soil of Egypt, became also the father of that people, which led the way for all others--like those early branches that one sees in spring, which shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die before the summer.
It nursed that people, whose least vestiges we discover to-day with surprise and wonder; a people who, in the very dawn, in the midst of the original barbarity, conceived magnificently the infinite and the divine; who placed with such certainty and grandeur the first architectural lines, from which afterwards our architecture was to be derived; who laid the bases of art, of science, and of all knowledge.
Later on, when this beautiful flower of humanity was faded, the Nile, flowing always in the midst of its deserts, seems to have had for mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its banks of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a homage of respect for these stupendous relics.

While the sand was burying the ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the colossi, nothing changed under this sky of changeless blue.

The same cultivation proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages; the same boats, with the same sails, went up and down the thread of water; the same songs kept time to the eternal human toil.