This desert of Memphis has not yet been profaned by hotels or motor
roads, such as we have seen in the "little desert" of the Sphinx--whose
three pyramids indeed we can discern at the extreme limit of the view,
prolonging almost to infinity for our eyes this domain of mummies. There
is nobody to be seen, nor any indication of the present day, amongst
these mournful undulations of yellow or pale grey sand, in which we seem
lost as in the swell of an ocean. The sky is cloudy--such as you can
scarcely imagine the sky of Egypt. And in this immense nothingness of
sand and stones, which stands out now more clearly against the clouds
on the horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the silhouettes of those
eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things which rise here and
there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost intact and preserving
still their sharp point. To-day they are the only landmarks of this
necropolis, which is nearly six miles in length, and was formerly
covered by temples of a magnificence and a vastness unimaginable to the
minds of our day. Except for one which is quite near us (the fantastic
grandfather of the others, that of King Zoser, who died nearly
5000 years ago), except for this one, which is made of six colossal
superposed terraces, they are all built after that same conception of
the _Triangle_, which is at once the most mysteriously simple figure
of geometry, and the strongest and most permanently stable form of
architecture. And now that there remains no trace of the frescoed
portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their multicoloured coatings,
now that they have taken on the same dead colour as the desert, they
look like the huge bones of giant fossils, that have long outlasted
their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath the ground, however, the
case is different; there, still remain the bodies of men, and even
of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw these vast structures
building, and who sleep intact, swathed in bandages, in the darkness