"What is happening? A ball, a
holiday, a grand marriage?" No. The moon is full to-night at Thebes,
upon the ruins. That is all.
CHAPTER XVI
THEBES IN SUNLIGHT
It is two o'clock in the afternoon. A white angry fire pours from the
sky, which is pale from excess of light. A sun inimical to the men of
our climate scorches the enormous fossil which, crumbling in places,
is all that remains of Thebes and which lies there like the carcass of
a gigantic beast that has been dead for thousands of years, but is too
massive ever to be annihilated.
In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade behind the monstrous
pillars, but even that shade is dusty and hot. The columns too are
hot, and so are all the blocks - and yet it is winter and the nights
are cold, even to the point of frost. Heat and dust; a reddish dust,
which hangs like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper Egypt,
exhaling an odour of spices and mummy.
The great heat seems to augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue
which seizes you as you regard these stones - too heavy for human
strength - which are massed here in mountains. One almost seems to
participate in the efforts, the exhaustions and the sweating toils of
that people, with their muscles of brand new steel, who in the
carrying and piling of such masses had to bear the yoke for thirty
centuries.
