It has the same square massiveness.
And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands--eternally the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere--in the palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri of the mummies.
The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs, their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious mystery.

But in the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the contrary, except for some figures mutilated by the hammers of Christians or Moslems, everything has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still throw their fearsome shadows.
The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos.

Then come, one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the daylight enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting the superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the walls.
And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of this heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep gloom.
The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the "Hall of Mystery" and formerly the high priest _alone, and he only once in each year_, had the right to enter it for the performance of some now unknown rites.
The "Hall of Mystery" is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it.

The meagre little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the most they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast rectangular cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among themselves their disconcerting mute conversations.
Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating past, and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its gods upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even its religious rites and its mummies.

The Ptolemies built temples here, which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos.