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 peoples--who dwelt in the valley of the Nile.

According to one of the most ancient of human traditions, the head of Osiris, the lord of the _other world_, reposed in the depths of one of the temples which to-day are buried in the sands.