One, where certain celebrated oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow.

High up in a wall the black hole of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor coming from the depths used to lead.

It was there that the face of the priest charged with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared--and the ceiling of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from the flame of his lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand years ago! ***** What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the sand of the desert, are hereabout! And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange treasures remain hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn distances, when you perceive stretching away to the horizon these fields of death, you realise better what kind of a place this Thebes once was.

Rebuilt as it were in the imagination it appears excessive, superabundant and multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian world which the fossils reveal to us.

Compared with it how our modern towns are dwarfed, and our hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old iron! And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries, once inhabited by gods and symbols.