The Sky Is Cloudy -
Such As You Can Scarcely Imagine The Sky Of Egypt.
And in this immense
nothingness of sand and stones, which stands out now more clearly
against the clouds on
The horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the
silhouettes of those eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things
which rise here and there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost
intact and preserving still their sharp point. To-day they are the
only landmarks of this necropolis, which is nearly six miles in
length, and was formerly covered by temples of a magnificence and a
vastness unimaginable to the minds of our day. Except for one which is
quite near us (the fantastic grandfather of the others, that of King
Zoser, who died nearly 5000 years ago), except for this one, which is
made of six colossal superposed terraces, they are all built after
that same conception of the /Triangle/, which is at once the most
mysteriously simple figure of geometry, and the strongest and most
permanently stable form of architecture. And now that there remains no
trace of the frescoed portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their
multicoloured coatings, now that they have taken on the same dead
colour as the desert, they look like the huge bones of giant fossils,
that have long outlasted their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath
the ground, however, the case is different; there, still remain the
bodies of men, and even of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw
these vast structures building, and who sleep intact, swathed in
bandages, in the darkness of their tunnels.
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