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“ The first impression of Karnak is that of a place of giants. The stone grilles still existing in the windows give the scale of these formidable beings. As you walk about in this forest of tall columns you ask yourself whether men weren’t served up whole on skewers, like larks. In the first courtyard, after the two great pylons as you come from the Nile, there is a fallen column all of whose segments are in order, despite the crash, exactly as would be a fallen pile of checkers. We return via the avenue of sphinxes: no one has its head - all decapitated.”

Gustave Flaubert, Travel Notes, May 1850

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