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Besides the buildings shown on the plan there were many other temples to the north, south, and east, entered by pylons and some of them connected together by avenues of sphinxes, obelisks, and colossi, which altogether made up the most wonderful agglomeration of buildings that can be conceived.
Where the sun had vanished long bars of purple lay above the horizon; to his excited fancy they looked like the gateway of another and a better world, set, as the old Egyptians dreamed, above the uttermost pylons of the West. What lay there beyond the sun? Oh! what lay beyond the sun? Perhaps, even now, Barbara knew! A figure appeared standing upon a sand dune between the pathway and the sea.
And then, leaving behind me the pylons guarded by the broken giants, I thread my way among the palaces of the centre. It is among these palaces that I encounter for good and all the night, with the first cries of the owls and ospreys. It is still warm there, on account of the heat stored by the stones during the day, but one feels nevertheless that the air is freezing.
From the top of one of these pyramids without apex, a watch looked at the country; from the other the priest on duty observed the stars. At the right and left of these towers, called pylons, extended walls, or rather long structures of one story, with narrow windows and flat roofs, on which sentries paced back and forth.
A league away, in the hotels of Luxor, I can fancy how they have hurried away from the tables, for fear of missing the celebrated spectacle. For me, therefore, it is time to beat a retreat, and, by the great avenue again, I direct my steps towards the pylons of the Ptolemies, where the night guards are waiting.
And this Syenite granite is so hard that time has not altered it in the least; in the midst of the confusion of stones the thighs of these mutilated giants gleam as if they had been polished yesterday. Farther on we come upon the second pylons, foundered also, before which stands a row of Pharaohs.
The sculptor has contrived to give this feeling great variety; but, on the whole, the large reclining figures the beautiful, relaxed Reclining Nymph and the Listening God over the great pylons seem to be meditatively listening, the seated figures have a fanciful, lighter suggestion and those standing give a gentle effect of rhythm.
Pools of water sparkled in the sunshine, the festoons of vines climbed on the arched arbours, and in the background stood out the gigantic pylons of the palace of Rameses Meïamoun, with its huge pylons, its enormous walls, its gilded and painted flagstaffs from which the colours blew out in the wind; and further to the north the two colossi sitting in postures of eternal immobility, mountains of granite in human shape, before the entrance to the Amenophium, showed through a bluish haze, half masking the still more distant Rhamesseium, and beyond it the tomb of the high-priest, but allowing the palace of Menephta to be seen at one of its angles.
He had even failed to see two men of high rank, though one, Hornecht, the captain of the archers, had waved his hand to him. They had retired into the deep gateway formed by the pylons at the entrance of the temple of Seth, to escape the clouds of dust which the desert wind was still blowing along the road.
The moon was risen over the city of the living that lay opposite the Necropolis of Thebes. The evening song had died away in the temples, that stood about a mile from the Nile, connected with each other by avenues of sphinxes and pylons; but in the streets of the city life seemed only just really awake.
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