Page "The Pharaoh's Daughter" Paragraph 14

So as not to overwhelm his readers with terror, Gautier frequently appeals to irony, which has an anticlimactic effect.

Irony serves the same function in the ballet, for example in the moment when Lord Wilson, the quintessence of Englishness, impassively attempts to sketch the scene of the desert disturbed by the simoom, or when Aspicia, after rising from the sarcophagus, looks into a mirror and is pleased to find herself as pretty as she was a few millennia before.