The avenue terminates beyond at a kind of wharf or landing-stage which formerly gave on to the Nile.

It was there that the God Amen, carried and followed by long trains of priests, came every year to take his golden barge for a solemn procession.

But it leads to-day only to the cornfields, for, in the course of successive centuries, the river has receded little by little and now winds its course a thousand yards away in the direction of Libya.
We can see, beyond, the old sacred Nile between the clusters of palm-trees on its banks; meandering there like a rosy pathway, which remains, nevertheless, in this hour of universal incandescence, astonishingly pale, and gleams occasionally with a bluish light.

And on the farther bank, from one end to the other of the western horizon, stretches the chain of the Libyan mountains behind which the sun is about to plunge; a chain of red sandstone, parched since the beginning of the world--without a rival in the preservation to perpetuity of dead bodies--which the Thebans perforated to its extreme depths to fill it with sarcophagi.
We watch the sun descend.

But we turn also to see, behind us, the ruins in this the traditional moment of their apotheosis.