But
the other stands out entire and white, with the whiteness of marble,
against the brown-coloured background of the enormous stretch of wall
covered with hieroglyphs. His face alone has been mutilated; and he
preserves still his imperious chin, his ears, his Sphinx's headgear,
one might almost say his meditative expression, before this deployment
of the vast solitude which seems to begin at his very feet.
Here however was only the boundary of the quarters of the God Amen.
The boundary of Thebes was much farther on, and the avenue which will
lead me directly to the home of the cat-headed goddesses extends
farther still to the old gates of the town; albeit you can scarcely
distinguish it between the double row of Krio-sphinxes all broken and
well-nigh buried.
The day falls, and the dust of Egypt, in accordance with its
invariable practice every evening, begins to resemble in the distance
a powder of gold. I look behind me from time to time at the giant who
watches me, seated at the foot of his pylon on which the history of a
Pharaoh is carved in one immense picture. Above him and above his
wall, which grows each minute more rose-coloured, I see, gradually
mounting in proportion as I move away from it, the great mass of the
palaces of the centre, the hypostyle hall, the halls of Thothmes and
the obelisks, all the entangled cluster of those things at once so
grand and so dead, which have never been equalled on earth.
And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy
apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling
remains of a gigantic skeleton. They seem to be begging for a merciful
surcease, as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each
setting of the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.
All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the
outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples
and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.
The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now
reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer. His attitude
moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban
statues. With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary
mortal who had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days -
for many days and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the
transparency of these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined
in the distance under the dim light of the stars - a great phantom in
his contemplative pose. And I feel myself obsessed now by the
continuance of his attitude at this entrance of the ruins - I who shall
pass without a morrow from Thebes and even from the earth - even as we
all pass.
