would overwhelm and swallow everything. It is the _Memphite desert_--a
place, that is to say, such as does not exist elsewhere on earth; a
fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, heaped up for some
three thousand years the embalmed bodies of their dead, exaggerating, as
time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs. Now, above the sand
which looks like the front of some great tidal wave arrested in its
progress, we see on all sides, and far into the distance, triangles of
superhuman proportions which were once the tombs of mummies; pyramids,
still upright, all of them, on their sinister pedestal of sand. Some
are comparatively near; others almost lost in the background of the
solitudes--and perhaps more awesome in that they are merely outlined in
grey, high up among the clouds.

*****

The little carriages that have brought us to the necropolis of Memphis,
through the interminable forest of palm-trees, had their wheels fitted
with large pattens for their journey over the sand.

Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome region, we commence to climb
a hill where all at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard; the
moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden silence around us, as
indeed is always the case when we reach these sands. It seems as if it
were a silence of respect which the desert itself imposes.

The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, until at last it
disappears, hidden by a line of sandhills--the first wave, as one might
say, of this waterless sea--and we are now mounted into the kingdom of
the dead, swept at this moment by a withering and almost icy wind, which
from below one would not have expected.