EGYPT (LA MORT DE PHILAE)

by Pierre Loti


Translated from the French by

W. P. Baines




CHAPTER I

A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE GREAT SPHINX

A night wondrously clear and of a colour unknown to our climate; a place
of dreamlike aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a bright silver,
which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely is no
longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in other
lands. A world in which everything is suffused with rosy color beneath
the stars of midnight, and where granite symbols rise up, ghostlike and
motionless.

Is that a hill of sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for it
has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy
cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised itself
there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this
kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured
too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and