Before conscious life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had been there since times which make you shudder to think upon.

For three and thirty centuries, or thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown men and women, who have gone before me, saw him just as I see him now, tranquil and white, in this same place, seated before this same threshold, with his head a little bent, and his pervading air of thought.
[*] Statue of Amenophis III.
I make my way without hastening, having always a tendency to stop and look behind me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the white dreamer, which now are all illumined with a last Bengal fire in the daily setting of the sun.
And the hour is already twilight when I reach the goddesses.
Their domain is so destroyed that the sands had succeeded in covering and hiding it for centuries.

But it has lately been exhumed.
There remain of it now only some fragments of columns, aligned in multiple rows in a vast extent of desert.

Broken and fallen stones and debris.[*] I walk on without stopping, and at length reach the sacred lake on the margin of which the great cats are seated in eternal council, each one on her throne.

The lake, dug by order of the Pharaohs, is in the form of an arc, like a kind of crescent.