Once inside the immense sanctuary, perhaps we shall find solitude again.

But, alas, under the profaned columns a crowd of people passes, with _Baedekers_ in their hands, the same people that one sees here everywhere, the same world as frequents Nice and the Riviera.

And, to crown the mockery, the noise of the dynamos pursues us even here, for the boats of Messrs.

Cook are moored to the bank close by.
Hundreds of columns, columns which are anterior by many centuries to those of Greece, and represent, in their naive enormity, the first conceptions of the human brain.

Some are fluted and give the impression of sheaves of monstrous weeds; others, quite plain and simple, imitate the stem of the papyrus, and bear by way of capital its strange flower.
The tourists, like the flies, enter at certain times of the day, which it suffices to know.