no one is important. But in the distance of the plain the Colossi shed
a real magic of calm and solemn personality, and subtly seem to mingle
their spirit with the flat, green world, so wide, so still, so fecund,
and so peaceful; with the soft airs that are surely scented with an
eternal springtime, and with the light that the morning rains down on
wheat and clover, on Indian corn and barley, and on brown men laboring,
who, perhaps, from the patience of the Colossi in repose have drawn a
patience in labor that has in it something not less sublime.

From the Colossi one goes onward toward the trees and the mountains, and
very soon one comes to the edge of that strange and fascinating strip of
barren land which is strewn with temples and honeycombed with tombs. The
sun burns down on it. The heat seems thrown back upon it by the wall of
tawny mountains that bounds it on the west. It is dusty, it is arid; it
is haunted by swarms of flies, by the guardians of the ruins, and by men
and boys trying to sell enormous scarabs and necklaces and amulets, made
yesterday, and the day before, in the manufactory of Kurna. From many
points it looks not unlike a strangely prolonged rubbish-heap in which
busy giants have been digging with huge spades, making mounds and pits,
caverns and trenches, piling up here a monstrous heap of stones, casting
down there a mighty statue. But how it fascinates! Of curse one knows
what it means. One knows that on this strip of land Naville dug out at
Deir-el-Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and discovered later, in her
shrine, Hathor, the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants streaming from
her sacred forehead to her feet; that long before him Mariette here
brought to the light at Drah-abu'l-Neggah the treasures of kings of
the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties; that at the foot of those
tiger-colored precipices Theodore M. Davis the American found the
sepulcher of Queen Hatshepsu, the Queen Elizabeth of the old Egyptian
world, and, later, the tomb of Yuaa and Thuaa, the parents of Queen