y embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.
In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the
palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously reappearing among
their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing moved slowly, wading
homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo,
two donkeys, followed by boys who held with brown hands their dark blue
skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his
quickly stepping horse. At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons
of Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in
the water, and growing to its edge, the pale sands that, far as the
eyes could see, from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward
the west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise
where men grow drowsy in well-being, and dream away the years. And
then I looked farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw
a Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it
saluted me after all my years of absence. Later I was to see it grey as
grey sands, sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black
as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars
at night, white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the
sand-dunes between it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted me,
as a golden miracle I shall remember it.

Slowly the sun went down. The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.
Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden
sands beneath the golden sky. And now the gold came traveling down from
the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the wine of
gold that flowed down Midas's throat; then, as the magic grew, to a
Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden ice,
hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The islands rising from
this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the palms and their
shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were the birds that flew
low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black the meeting leaves
of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel from where I stood to Mena
House. And presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, and
near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than it, but scarcely less
mysterious. The gold deepened, glowed more fiercely. In the sky above
the Pyramids hung tiny cloud