I look behind me from time to time at the giant who watches me, seated at the foot of his pylon on which the history of a Pharaoh is carved in one immense picture.

Above him and above his wall, which grows each minute more rose-coloured, I see, gradually mounting in proportion as I move away from it, the great mass of the palaces of the centre, the hypostyle hall, the halls of Thothmes and the obelisks, all the entangled cluster of those things at once so grand and so dead, which have never been equalled on earth.
And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling remains of a gigantic skeleton.

They seem to be begging for a merciful surcease, as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each setting of the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.
All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.
The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer.

His attitude moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban statues.
With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary mortal who had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days--for many days and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the transparency of these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined in the distance under the dim light of the stars--a great phantom in his contemplative pose.

And I feel myself obsessed now by the continuance of his attitude at this entrance of the ruins--I who shall pass without a morrow from Thebes and even from the earth--even as we all pass.