of their tunnels. _We know_, for we have penetrated there before, what
things are hidden in the womb of this old desert, on which the yellow
shroud of the sand grows thicker and thicker as the centuries pass.
The whole deep rock had been perforated patiently to make hypogea and
sepulchral chambers, great and small, and veritable palaces for the
dead, adorned with innumerable painted figures. And though now, for
some two thousand years, men have set themselves furiously to exhume
the sarcophagi and the treasures that are buried here, the subterranean
reserves are not yet exhausted. There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of
undisturbed sleepers, who will never be discovered.

As we advance the wind grows stronger and colder beneath a sky that
becomes increasingly cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The
sand is the undisputed sovereign of the necropolis; if it does not surge
and roll like some enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when seen
from the green valley below, it nevertheless covers everything with an
obstinate persistence which has continued since the beginning of time.
Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable statues and colossi and
temples of the Sphinx. It comes without a pause, from Libya, from the
great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the universe. It harmonises
well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids, which form immutable rocks
on its always shifting extent; and if one thinks of it, it gives a more
thrilling sense of anterior eternities even than all these Egyptian
ruins, which, in comparison with it, are things of yesterday. The
sand--the sand of the primitive seas--which represents a labour of
erosion of a duration impossible to conceive, and bears witness to a
continuity of destruction which, one might say, had no beginning.

Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and
half buried in sand, at which we have to stop. It was once the house