THEBES IN SUNLIGHT It is two o'clock in the afternoon.

A white angry fire pours from the sky, which is pale from excess of light.

A sun inimical to the men of our climate scorches the enormous fossil which, crumbling in places, is all that remains of Thebes and which lies there like the carcass of a gigantic beast that has been dead for thousands of years, but is too massive ever to be annihilated.
In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade behind the monstrous pillars, but even that shade is dusty and hot.

The columns too are hot, and so are all the blocks--and yet it is winter and the nights are cold, even to the point of frost.

Heat and dust; a reddish dust, which hangs like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper Egypt, exhaling an odour of spices and mummy.
The great heat seems to augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue which seizes you as you regard these stones--too heavy for human strength--which are massed here in mountains.