wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as
the gossamers of Tunis. As I turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first
lights glittering across the fields of doura, silvery white, like
diamonds. But the silver did not call me. My imagination was held
captive by the gold. I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under
the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail's road, toward it. And I dwelt in it
many days.

The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the
spirits' eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher
till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.
Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down,
penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king's chamber, listen to the
silence there, feel it with your hands--is it not tangible in this hot
fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like the surreptitious midget
you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished
stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off
pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter
of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man
has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed,
though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land
it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know
that you can climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from all
sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you.

No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock and
stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like the
soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin retreating from
you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the
pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.

II

THE SPHINX

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx--a bird
like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin where
perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the birth
of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird flew near
the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying now low, now
high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it, which held it,
from which it surely lon