A TWENTIETH-CENTURY EVENING AT THEBES An impalpable dust floats in a sky which scarcely ever knows a cloud; a dust so impalpable that, even while it powders the heavens with gold, it leaves them their infinite transparency.

It is a dust of remote ages, of things destroyed; a dust that is here continually--of which the gold at this moment fades to green at the zenith, but flames and glistens in the west, for it is now that magnificent hour which marks the end of the day's decline, and the still burning globe of the sun, quite low down in the heaven, begins to light up on all sides the conflagration of the evening.
This setting sun illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite, which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins.

And of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions so gigantic, seem superhuman.

In places, huge masses of carven stone--pylons--still stand upright, rising like hills.

Others are crumbling in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone.