And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red.

They are the remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here for some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of time in the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become in time mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and sometimes even in the submerging sands.
A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses; a heap of broken jars or amphorae--myriads of them--that served to carry the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of walls, repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with hieroglyphs lie upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or Coptic sculptures or Roman capitals.

In our countries, where the past is of yesterday, we have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead things.
Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on all sides like a jealous rampart.

Until recently indeed they covered it almost to its roof.

From the very first its appearance is disconcerting: it is so grand, so austere and gloomy.