to cite instances of illustrative human lives
they will be strictly biographical but anonymous."

"You hope to succeed where Maeterlinck failed."

"Maeterlinck thinks as a poet and only fails when he writes as a
philosopher. Don, I wish I could have you beside me in my hours of
doubt. Thessaly is inspiring, but his influence is sheerly intellectual.
You have the trick of harmonising all that was discordant within myself.
I see my work as a moving pageant and every figure is in its appointed
place. I realise that all the knowledge of the world means nothing
beside one short human existence. Upon the Ogam tablets, the Assyrian
cylinders, the Egyptian monuments is written a wisdom perhaps greater
than ours, but it is cold, like the stone that bears it; within
ourselves it lives--all that knowledge, that universe of truth. What do
the Egyptologists know of the message of Egypt? I have stood upon the
summit of the Great Pyramid and have watched its shadow steal out and
out touching the distant lands with its sceptre, claiming Egypt for its
own; I have listened in the profound darkness at its heart to the voice
of the silence and have thought myself an initiate buried, awaiting the
unfolding of the mystic Rose of Isis. And science would have us believe
that that wondrous temple is a tomb! A tomb! when truly it is a
birthplace!"

His dark eyes glowed almost fiercely. To Don alone did he thus reveal
himself, mantled in a golden rhetoric.

"Mitrahina, too, the village on the mounds which cloak with their
memorable ashes the splendour that was Memphis; who has not experienced
the mournful allurement of those palm-groves amid which lie the fallen
colossi of Rameses? But how many have responded to it? They beckon me,
Don, bidding me to the gates of royal Memphis, to the palace of the
Pharaoh. A faint breeze steals over the desert, and they shudder and
sigh because palace and temple are dust and the King of the Upper and
Lower Land is but a half-remembered name strange upon the lips of men.
Ah! who that has heard it can forget the call, soft and mournful, of the
palm-groves of Mitrahina?

"I would make such places sacred and no vulgar foot should ever profane
them. Once, as I passed the entrance to the tomb of Seti in the Valley
of the Kings, I met a fat German coming out. He was munching sandwiches,
and I had to turn aside; I believe I clenched my fists. A picture of the
shameful Clodius at the feast of Bona Dea arose before m