Above All, There Is The Sand, Encroaching
Now Upon The Very Threshold Of The Pharaohs; There Is The Yellow
Desert; There Is The World Of Reflections And Of Silence, Which
Approaches Like A Slow Submerging Tide.
In the distance, where the
mirage trembles from morning till evening, the burying is already
almost achieved.
The few poor stones which still appear, barely
emerging from the advancing dunes, are the remains of what men, in
their superb revolts against death, had contrived to make the most
massively indestructible.
And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades over Thebes the irony of
its duration - for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive!
Nowhere so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing
that all our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of
fermentation round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire,
and that that fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an
ephemeral meteor, a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the
innumerable cosmic transformations, in the course of times without end
and without beginning.
CHAPTER XVII
AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.
King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd
years, by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court
dress is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not
above taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from
eight o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and
if he rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only
because, as soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.
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