How many treasures and relics and documents are hidden and guarded by this mosque of the peristyle! For none would dare to dig in the ground within its sacred walls.
Gradually the silence of the temple becomes profound.

And if the shortened shadows betray the hour of noon, there is nothing to tell to what millennium that hour belongs.

The silences and middays like to this, which have passed before the eyes of these giants ambushed in their colonnades--who could count them?
High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, soar the birds of prey--and they were there in the times of the Pharaohs, displaying in the air identical plumages, uttering the same cries.

The beasts and plants, in the course of time, have varied less than men, and remain unchanged in the smallest details.
Each of the colossi around me--standing there proudly with one leg advanced as if for a march, heavy and sure, which nothing should withstand--grasps passionately in his clenched fist, at the end of the muscular arm, a kind of buckled cross, which in Egypt was the symbol of eternal life.

And this is what the decision of their movement symbolises: confident all of them in this poor bauble which they hold in their hand, they cross with a triumphant step the threshold of death.
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