Friday, 4 May

We depart at dawn, clear and cold, through large white poppy flowers, all wet from the May dew. For the first time since Shiraz, my Persians have put on their cloaks and pulled down their Magian hats down as far as their ears. We cross the plain again and climb, passing by to say our farewells to the grand silent palaces. But the morning light, which never fails to emphasize all the decay and decrepitude, now shows us the splendours of Darius and Xerxes to be more in ruins than the yesterday evening: the majestic stairs are more broken; the scattering of the columns on the ground is more pitiful. The astonishing bas-reliefs alone, of grey flint, undamaged by the centuries, support without flinching the light of the rising sun. Princes with curly beards and warriors or priests shine in broad daylight, as newly polished as the day when a Macedonian horde appeared like a hurricane.

As I am treading this mysterious ground, my foot strikes a half-buried piece of wood, which I pull out to look at. It is a fragment of some beam which must have been enormous, of indestructible cedar of Lebanon. It certainly comes from one of Darius's constructions. I pick it up and turn it over. One side is carbonized black and crumbling: the fire set alight by Alexander's torch! Traces of this legendary fire are still there, there in my hands, still visible after more than twenty-two centuries. For an instant, past time disappears for me and it seems this fire was only yesterday. You would think a spell calling up the dead lay sleeping in this block of cedar. In a sort of vision, I see the splendour of these palaces much better than yesterday evening. I see the glitter of the enamels, gold and purple carpets, the ostentation of these unimaginable rooms, which were higher than the nave of the Madeleine1 and whose rows of columns continued into the semi-darkness of the forest, like avenues of giant trees. A passage from Plutarch comes to mind. It is a passage translated long ago, when I was a student, feeling grumpy and bored, under threat of a teacher's cane, but which suddenly springs to life and becomes clear to me: the description of a night of orgy in the town which stretched out here around these esplanades, where there are now fields of wild flowers.