To Think Of The Clamorous Multitudes Who
Once Assembled Here, Of Their Cries Of Triumph And Anguish, Of Their
Dying Agonies.
First of all the pantings of those thousands of
harnessed workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation,
under the burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other
these stones, whose enormity now amazes us.
And the prodigious feasts,
the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the
slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of
the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian
peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies
of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of
beasts. To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm
and blue! And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny
hands now rest, to think of the beings who have touched them in
passing, who have fallen by their side in last sanguinary conflicts,
without rubbing even the polish from their changeless surfaces!
*****
I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation
of fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold. To find himself
in the dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter.
It seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which
has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very
massiveness, like the mountains.
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