It emerges gradually from the light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger than it is.
The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in detail; and reveals it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the midst of a silent plain, on the yellow carpet of the desert.

And how this sun, rising in its clear splendour, seems to crush it with its youth and stupendous duration.

This same sun had attained to its present round form, had acquired the clear precision of its disc, and begun its daily promenade over the country of the sands, countless centuries of centuries, before it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal.

And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four negligible thousands of years.
***** An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what a surprise awaits us there! The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal hotel, obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of iron.

Twice or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple, its impudent facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow.