What Strikes Us Most Of All In The Colossal Hypogeum Is The Meeting
There, In The Middle Of The Stairway By Which We Leave, With Yet
Another Black Coffin, Which Lies Across Our Path As If To Bar It.
It
is as monstrous and as simple as the others, its seniors, which many
centuries before, as the deified bulls died, had commenced to line the
great straight thoroughfare.
But this one has never reached its place
and never held its mummy. It was the last. Even while men were slowly
rolling it, with tense muscles and panting cries, towards what might
well have seemed its eternal chamber, others gods were born, and the
cult of the Apis had come to an end - suddenly, then and there! Such a
fate may happen indeed to each and all of the religions and
institutions of men, even to those most deeply rooted in their hearts
and their ancestral past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing of
all our positive notions: to know that there will be a /last/ of all
things, not only a last temple, and a last priest, but a last birth of
a human child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . .
*****
In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew
outside, and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of
horror that were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind.
Sinister as it is under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely
intolerable to look upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the
daylight fails.
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