And It Was To The
Neighbouring Mountains That The Products Of So Many Careful Wrappings
Were Borne For Burial, While The Nile Carried Away The Blood From The
Bodies And The Filth Of Their Entrails.
That chain of living rocks
that rises before us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of
a tender flower, is literally stuffed with dead bodies.
We have to cross a wide plain before reaching the mountains, and on
our way cornfields alternate with stretches of sand already
desertlike. Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite bank which
we have lately quitted - the bank of Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic
colonnades are as it were lengthened below by their own reflection in
the mirror of the river. And in this radiant morning, in this pure
light, it would be admirable, this eternal temple, with its image
reversed in the depth of the blue water, were it not that at its
sides, and to twice its height, rises the impudent Winter Palace, that
monster hotel built last year for the fastidious tourists. And yet,
who knows? The jackanapes who deposited this abomination on the sacred
soil of Egypt perhaps imagines that he equals the merit of the artist
who is now restoring the sanctuaries of Thebes, or even the glory of
the Pharaohs who built them.
As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, where this king awaits us, we
traverse fields still green with growing corn - and sparrows and larks
sing around us in the impetuous spring of this land of Thebes.
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