But to build towns in a land
inundated every year, let us always remark that it was first necessary
to raise the land of the towns on piles in this land of mud, and to
render them inaccessible to the flood; it was essential, before taking
this necessary course, and before being in a state to attempt these
great works, for the people to have practised retreating during the
rising of the Nile, amid the rocks which form two chains right and left
of this river. It was necessary for these mustered peoples to have the
instruments for tilling, those of architecture, a knowledge of
surveying, with laws and a police. All this necessarily requires a
prodigious space of time. We see by the long details which face every
day the most necessary and the smallest of our undertakings, how
difficult it is to do great things, and it needs not only indefatigable
stubbornness, but several generations animated with this stubbornness.
However, whether it be Menes, Thaut or Cheops, or Rameses who erected
one or two of these prodigious masses, we shall not be the more
instructed of the history of ancient Egypt: the language of this people
is lost. We therefore know nothing but that before the most ancient
historians there was matter for making an ancient history.
_IGNORANCE_
I am ignorant of how I was formed, and of how I was born. For a quarter
of my life I was absolutely ignorant of the reasons for all that I saw,
heard and felt, and I was nothing but a parrot at whom other parrots
chattered.
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