bad foot, and
declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid. He had been
up and down without a guide; he had disturbed the jackal which lives
near its summit, and which I saw running in the sunshine as Ali drew
near its lair, and he was satisfied to rest on his immortal laurels. To
the Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark Twain's world-wide celebrity is owing
to one fact alone: he is the only Roumi who has climbed the second
Pyramid. That is why his name is known to every one.

It was the "Little Christmas," and from the villages in the plain the
Egyptians came pouring out to visit their dead in the desert cemeteries
as I passed by to visit the dead in the tombs far off on the horizon.
Women, swathed in black, gathered in groups and jumped monotonously up
and down, to the accompaniment of stained hands clapping, and strange
and weary songs. Tiny children blew furiously into tin trumpets,
emitting sounds that were terribly European. Men strode seriously by,
or stood in knots among the graves, talking vivaciously of the things of
this life. As the sun rose higher in the heavens, this visit to the dead
became a carnival of the living. Laughter and shrill cries of merriment
betokened the resignation of the mourners. The sand-dunes were black
with running figures, racing, leaping, chasing one another, rolling over
and over in the warm and golden grains. Some sat among the graves and
ate. Some sang. Some danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up.
The Great Pyramid of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and
gleamed like a marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at
El-Outaya, in Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until
at last I could see only a small section with its top, which looked
almost as pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones
in the golden eye of the sun--Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and
to serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb
it. Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
between the little sphinxes.

Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, glea