Crossword-Solution: BALBEC 6 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

Look about you, man; where are the multitudes that once peopled these prairies; the kings and the palaces; the riches and the mightinesses of this desert?” “Where are the monuments that would prove the truth of so vague a theory?” “I know not what you call a monument.” “The works of man! The glories of Thebes and Balbec—columns, catacombs, and pyramids! standing amid the sands of the East, like wrecks on a rocky shore, to testify to the storms of ages!” “They are gone.

Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined them all.

And, as it happened, there was no need for any of us to introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who, without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of visiting those parts, walked into the trap uninvited one evening, when we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.

Down there, close to Balbec, among all those places which are still so uncivilised, there is a little bay, charmingly quiet, where the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which, all the same, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and insignificant; for in that moist and gentle atmosphere these heavenly flower-beds will break into blossom, in a few moments, in the evenings, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade.

Balbec! the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil, the true Armor, the sea, the land's end, the accursed region which Anatole France--an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to read--has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey.