beginning no doubt, slumbered in mysterious germ in the human brain—­the idea of rectitude, the straight line, the right angle, the vertical line, of which Nature furnishes no example, even symmetry, which, if you consider it well, is less explicable still.  They employed symmetry with a consummate mastery, understanding as well as we do all the effect that is to be obtained by the repetition of like objects placed en pendant on either side of a portico or an avenue.  But they did not invent the vault.  And therefore, since there was a limit to the size of the stones which they were able to place flat like beams, they had recourse to this profusion of columns to support their stupendous ceilings.  And thus it is that there seems to be a want of air, that one seems to stifle in the middle of their temples, dominated and obstructed as they are by the rigid presence of so many stones.  And yet to-day you can see quite clearly in these temples, for, since the suspended rocks which served for roof have fallen, floods of light descend from all parts.  But formerly, when a kind of half night reigned in the deep halls, beneath the immovable carapaces of sandstone or granite, how oppressive and sepulchral it must all have been—­how final and pitiless, like a gigantic palace of Death!  On one day, however, in each year, here at Thebes, a light as of a conflagration used to penetrate from one end to the other of the sanctuaries of Amen; for the middle artery is open towards the north-west, and is aligned in such a fashion that, once a year, one solitary time, on the evening of the summer solstice, the sun as it sets is able to plunge its reddened rays straight into the sanctuaries.  At the moment when it enlarges its blood-coloured disc before descending behind the desolation of the Libyan mountains, it arrives in the very axis of this avenue, of this suite of aisles, which measures more than 800 yards in length.  Formerly, then, on these evenings it shone horizontally beneath the terrible ceilings—­between these rows of pillars which are as high as our Colonne Vendome—­and threw, for some seconds, its colours of molten copper into the obscurity of the holy of holies.  And then the whole temple would resound with the clashing of music, and the glory of the god of Thebes was celebrated in the depths of the forbidden halls.

*****

Like a cloud, like a veil, the continual red-coloured dust floats everywhere above the ruins, and, athwart it, here and there, the sun traces long, white beams, But at one point of the avenue, behind the obelisks, it seems to rise in clouds, this dust of Egypt, as if it were smoke.  For the workers of bronze are assembled there to-day and, hour by hour, without ceasing, they dig in the sacred soil.  Ridiculously small and almost negligible by the side of the great monoliths they dig and dig.  Patiently they clear the ruins, and the earth goes away in little parcels in rows of baskets carried by children in the form