On The Overturned Surfaces, My Hands Encounter The Deep,
Clear-Cut Hollows Of The Hieroglyphs, And Sometimes Of Those
Inevitable People, Carved In Profile, Who Raise Their Arms, All Of
Them, And Make Signs To One Another.
On arriving at the bottom I am
received by a row of statues with battered faces, seated on thrones,
and without hindrance of any kind, and recognising everything in the
blue transparency which takes the place of day, I come to the great
avenue of the palaces of Amen.
We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable to this
avenue, which passive multitudes took nearly three thousand years to
construct, expending, century after century, their innumerable
energies in carrying these stones, which our machines now could not
move. And the objective was always the same: to prolong indefinitely
the perspectives of pylons, colossi and obelisks, continuing always
this same artery of temples and palaces in the direction of the old
Nile - while the latter, on the contrary, receded slowly, from century
to century, towards Libya. It is here, and especially at night, that
you suffer the feeling of having been shrunken to the size of a pygmy.
All round you rise monoliths mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty
paces to pass the base of a single one of them. They are placed quite
close together, too close, it seems, in view of their enormity and
mass. There is not enough air between them, and the closeness of their
juxtaposition disconcerts you more, perhaps, even than their
massiveness.
The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as
disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes - the hall of the
feasts of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, that this king
gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these
ceilings, of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty
men? In places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost
diaphanous in the air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in
unbroken alignment against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the
destruction is bewildering; fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-
reliefs lie about in indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered
wreckage after a world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the
hand of man should overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at
different times, have also come to shake this Cyclops palace which
threatened to be eternal. And all this - which represents such an
excess of force, of movement, of impulsion, alike for its erection as
for its overthrow - all this is tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil,
although toppling as if for an imminent downfall - tranquil forever,
one might say, congealed by the cold and by the night.
I was prepared for silence in such a place, but not for the sounds
which I commence to hear. First of all an osprey sounds the prelude,
above my head and so close to me that it holds me trembling throughout
its long cry.
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