"No, all is not passing away!" said Sténio. "Look at the sun, and the earth, and the beautiful sky, and these green hills; and even that ice, winter's fragile edifice, which has withstood the rays of summer for centuries. Even so man's frail power will prevail! What matters the fall of a few generations? Do you weep for so slight a thing, Lélia? Do you deem it possible a single idea can die in the universe? Will not that imperishable inheritance be found intact in the dust of our extinct races, just as the inspirations of art and the discoveries of science arise alive each day from the ashes of Pompeii or the tombs of Memphis? Oh, what a great and striking proof of intellectual immortality! Deep mysteries had been lost in the night of time; the world had forgotten its age, and thinking itself still young, was alarmed at feeling itself so old. It said as you do, Lélia: 'I am about to end, for I am growing weak, and I was born but a few days ago! How few I shall need for dying, since so few were needed for living!' But one day human corpses were exhumed from the bosom of Egypt--Egypt that had lived out its period of civilization, and has just lived its period of barbarism! Egypt, where the ancient light, lost so long, is being rekindled, and a rested and rejuvenated Egypt may perhaps soon come and establish herself upon the extinguished torch of our own. Egypt, the living image of her mummies sleeping under the dust of ages, and now awaking to the broad daylight of science in order to reveal the age of the old world to the new! Is this not solemn and terrible, Lélia? Within the dried-up entrails of a human corpse the inquisitive glance of our century discovered the papyrus, that mysterious and sacred monument of man's eternal power--the still dark but incontrovertible witness of the imposing duration of creation. Our eager hand unrolls those perfumed bandages, those frail and indissoluble shrouds at which destruction stopt short. These bandages that once enfolded a corpse, these manuscripts that have rested under fleshless ribs in the place once occupied perhaps by a soul, are human thought; exprest in the science of signs, and transmitted by the help of an art we had lost, but have found again in the sepulchers of the East--the art of preserving the remains of the dead from the outrages of corruption--the greatest power in the universe. O Lélia, deny the youth of the world if you can, when you see it stop in artless ignorance before the lessons of the past, and begin to live on the forgotten ruins of an unknown world."