It Is A Dust Of
Remote Ages, Of Things Destroyed; A Dust That Is Here Continually - Of
Which The Gold
At this moment fades to green at the zenith, but flames
and glistens in the west, for it is now
That magnificent hour which
marks the end of the day's decline, and the still burning globe of the
sun, quite low down in the heaven, begins to light up on all sides the
conflagration of the evening.
This setting sun illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite,
which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And
of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions
so gigantic, seem superhuman. In places, huge masses of carven stone -
pylons - still stand upright, rising like hills. Others are crumbling
in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone. It is difficult
to conceive how these things, so massive that they might have seemed
eternal, could come to suffer such an utter ruin. Fragments of
columns, fragments of obelisks, broken by downfalls of which the mere
imagination is awful, heads and head-dresses of giant divinities, all
lie higgledy-piggledy in a disorder beyond possible redress. Nowhere
surely on our earth does the sun in his daily revolution cast his
light on such debris as this, on such a litter of vanished palaces and
dead colossi.
It was even here, seven or eight thousand years ago, under this pure
crystal sky, that the first awakening of human thought began.
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