--the lesson that
Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to Kheper, although she
owes her marvels to men; that when he created the sun which shines upon
her, he gave her the lustre of her life, and that those who come to her
must be sun-worshippers if they would truly and intimately understand
the treasure or romance that lies heaped within her bosom.

Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in the Boat of the Sun. If you
would love Egypt rightly, you, too, must be a traveller in that bark.
You must not fear to steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the
mystery of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered
out of the sun. The sacred white lotus must be your emblem, and Horus,
the hawk-headed, merged in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set
foot once more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the sun
and soothed my fears to sleep.

I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels; I saw crowded streets;
brilliant shops; English officials driving importantly in victorias,
surely to pay dreadful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with
Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of--I guess--the
latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the right hand and on the left
waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany, Levantine
touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their lean fingers,
an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking chocolate on a
terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to visit monuments
in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I'll be in Scotland
before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed
to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was after four in the
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that
the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--moved me as few, rare
things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the
long road--Ismail's road--that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the
Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured
me.

It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a
tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in
the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses
in their feather