It Knew Not The Dull Days
And The Humidity Under Which We Suffer, But Kept Always The Changeless
Sky Of The Immense Surrounding Deserts, Which Exhaled No Vapour That
Might Dim The Horizon.
It was this eternal splendour of its light, no
doubt, and this easiness of life, which brought forth here the first
fruits of human thought.
This same Nile, after having so patiently
created the soil of Egypt, became also the father of that people,
which led the way for all others - like those early branches that one
sees in spring, which shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die
before the summer. It nursed that people, whose least vestiges we
discover to-day with surprise and wonder; a people who, in the very
dawn, in the midst of the original barbarity, conceived magnificently
the infinite and the divine; who placed with such certainty and
grandeur the first architectural lines, from which afterwards our
architecture was to be derived; who laid the bases of art, of science,
and of all knowledge.
Later on, when this beautiful flower of humanity was faded, the Nile,
flowing always in the midst of its deserts, seems to have had for
mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its
banks of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a
homage of respect for these stupendous relics. While the sand was
burying the ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the
colossi, nothing changed under this sky of changeless blue.
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