All the sublime, fresh-minded striving of the human soul after the Unknowable is as it were petrified in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand.

And subsisting thus down to our day it puts us to shame.

Compared with this people, who thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful dotards, who soon will be past caring about the wherefore of life, or thought, or death.

Such beginnings presaged, surely, something greater than our humanity of the present day, given over to despair, to alcohol and to explosives! ***** Crumbling and dust! This same sun of Thebes is in its place each day, parching, exhausting, cracking and pulverising.
On the ground where once stood so much magnificence there are fields of corn, spread out like green carpets, which tell of the return of the humble life of tillage.

Above all, there is the sand, encroaching now upon the very threshold of the Pharaohs; there is the yellow desert; there is the world of reflections and of silence, which approaches like a slow submerging tide.