good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces beauty
with the other--preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial turmult;
that stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the Western
man, even in the midst of what seems, perhaps, like intimacy; Eastern
to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the vulgarities, the
brilliant ineptitudes of the West beat about it like waves about some
unyielding wall of the sea.

When I went back to Egypt, after a lapse of many years, I fled at once
from Cairo, and upon the long reaches of the Nile, in the great spaces
of the Libyan Desert, in the luxuriant palm-grooves of the Fayyum,
among the tamarisk-bushes and on the pale waters of Kurun, I forgot the
changes which, in my brief glimpse of the city and its environs, had
moved me to despondency. But one cannot live in the solitudes for ever.
And at last from Madi-nat-al-Fayyum, with the first pilgrims starting
for Mecca, I returned to the great city, determined to seek in it once
more for the fascinations it used to hold, and perhaps still held in the
hidden ways where modern feet, nearly always in a hurry, had seldom time
to penetrate.

A mist hung over the land. Out of it, with a sort of stern energy, there
came to my ears loud hymns sung by the pilgrim voices--hymns in which,
mingled with the enthusiasm of devotees en route for the holiest shrine
of their faith, there seemed to sound the resolution of men strung up to
confront the fatigues and the dangers of a great journey through a wild
and unknown country. Those hymns led my feet to the venerable mosques of
Cairo, the city of mosques, guided me on my lesser pilgrimage among the
cupolas and the colonnades, where grave men dream in the silence near
marble fountains, or bend muttering their prayers beneath domes that are
dimmed by the ruthless fingers of Time. In the buildings consecrated to
prayer and to meditation I first sought for the magic that still lurks
in the teeming bosom of Cairo.

Long as I had sought it elsewhere, in the brilliant bazaars by day,
and by night in the winding alleys, where the dark-eyed Jews looked
stealthily forth from the low-browed doorways; where the Circassian
girls promenade, gleaming with golden coins and barbaric jewels;
where the air is alive with music that is feverish and antique, and in
strangely lighted interiors one sees forms clad in brilliant draperies,
or severely draped in the simplest pale-blue garments, moving