Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the shadow and I did not know it
was so near.
But Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the world
could produce such an apparition. And I salute with a kind of shudder
of respect this unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted me for
many years, but which until now life had not left me time to visit.
And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of
the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we
must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace
which the rising sun has just disclosed to us.
And while my equipage of bronze - intoning that song, as old as Egypt
and everlastingly the same, which seems to help the men in their
arduous work - is busy unfastening the chain which binds us to the
bank, I continue to watch the distant apparition. It emerges gradually
from the light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger
than it is. The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in
detail; and reveals it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the
midst of a silent plain, on the yellow carpet of the desert. And how
this sun, rising in its clear splendour, seems to crush it with its
youth and stupendous duration. This same sun had attained to its
present round form, had acquired the clear precision of its disc, and
begun its daily promenade over the country of the sands, countless
centuries of centuries, before it saw, as it might be yesterday, this
town of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to
promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but
which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal.
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