To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny hands now rest, to think of the beings who have touched them in passing, who have fallen by their side in last sanguinary conflicts, without rubbing even the polish from their changeless surfaces! ***** I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation of fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold.

To find himself in the dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter.

It seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very massiveness, like the mountains.

Nothing human is so vast.

Nowhere on earth have men conceived such dwellings.