centuries before.

What strikes us most of all in the colossal hypogeum is the meeting
there, in the middle of the stairway by which we leave, with yet another
black coffin, which lies across our path as if to bar it. It is as
monstrous and as simple as the others, its seniors, which many centuries
before, as the deified bulls died, had commenced to line the great
straight thoroughfare. But this one has never reached its place and
never held its mummy. It was the last. Even while men were slowly
rolling it, with tense muscles and panting cries, towards what might
well have seemed its eternal chamber, others gods were born, and the
cult of the Apis had come to an end--suddenly, then and there! Such a
fate may happen indeed to each and all of the religions and institutions
of men, even to those most deeply rooted in their hearts and their
ancestral past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing of all our
positive notions: to know that there will be a _last_ of all things,
not only a last temple, and a last priest, but a last birth of a human
child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . .

*****

In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew outside,
and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of horror that
were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind. Sinister as it is
under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely intolerable to look
upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the daylight fails.

On our return to it, from the subterranean darkness, everything in its
dead immensity has begun to take on the blue tint of the night. On the
top of the sandhills, of which the yellow colour has greatly paled since