slope towards us, in a prodigious incline, from the strange mountains
that we saw from the happy plain, and which now appear, enthroned
beyond, like the monarchs of all this nothingness.

The town of Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose
once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the
solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of
Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the
marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless
waves and preserved them almost intact up till the present day.

The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its shifting soil, which
smothers the sound of our steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to
change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if great fires had been
lighted in the neighbourhood.

And this whole domain of light and drought, right away into the
distance, is shaded and streaked with the familiar brown, red and yellow
colours. The mournful reflection of adjacent things augments to excess
the heat and light. The horizon trembles under the little vapours of
mirage like water ruffled by the wind. The background, which mounts
gradually to the foot of the Libyan mountains, is strewn with the debris
of bricks and stones--shapeless ruins which, though they scarcely rise
above the sand, abound nevertheless in great numbers, and serve to
remind us that here indeed is a very ancient soil, where men laboured in
centuries that have drifted out of knowledge. One divines instinctively
and at once the catacombs, the hypogea and the mummies that lie beneath!

These necropoles of Abydos once--and for thousands of years--exercised
an extraordinary fascination over this people--the precursor of