*****
What A Number Of Ruins, Scarcely Emerging From The Sand Of The Desert,
Are Hereabout!
And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange
treasures remain hidden!
When the sun lights thus the forlorn
distances, when you perceive stretching away to the horizon these
fields of death, you realise better what kind of a place this Thebes
once was. Rebuilt as it were in the imagination it appears excessive,
superabundant and multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian
world which the fossils reveal to us. Compared with it how our modern
towns are dwarfed, and our hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old
iron!
And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries,
once inhabited by gods and symbols. 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.
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