It comes without a pause, from Libya, from the great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the universe.

It harmonises well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids, which form immutable rocks on its always shifting extent; and if one thinks of it, it gives a more thrilling sense of anterior eternities even than all these Egyptian ruins, which, in comparison with it, are things of yesterday.

The sand--the sand of the primitive seas--which represents a labour of erosion of a duration impossible to conceive, and bears witness to a continuity of destruction which, one might say, had no beginning.
Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and half buried in sand, at which we have to stop.

It was once the house of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still shelters the director of the excavations, from whom we have to obtain permission to descend amongst the Apis.

The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light.