between the settees, an Egyptian, in his long blue gown, was dancing.
The expression of responsibility on his face amounted to anxiety as he
took his steps with great care, now lifting one bare foot as high as he
could, and turning it sidewise, as if to show us the sole; now putting
it down and hopping upon it, while he displayed to us in the same way
the sole of the other. This formal dancing is done by the guests when no
public performers are employed. Some one must dance to express the
revelry of the occasion; those who are invited, therefore, undertake the
duty one by one. When at last we went on our way we were obliged to ride
directly through the reception, our donkeys brushing the band on one
side and the guests on the other; the dancer on duty paused for a
moment, wiping his face with the tail of his gown.

The road leading to Heliopolis has a charm which it shares with no other
in the neighborhood of Cairo: at a certain point the desert--the real
desert--comes rolling up to its very edge; one can look across the sand
for miles. The desert is not a plain, the sand lies in ridges and
hillocks; and this sand in many places is not so much like the sand of
the sea-shore as it is like the dust of one of our country roads in
August. The contrast between the bright green of the cultivated fields
(the land which is reached by the inundation) and those silvery,
arrested waves is striking, the line of their meeting being as sharply
defined as that between sea and shore. I have called the color silvery,
but that is only one of the tints which the sand assumes. An artist has
jotted down the names of the colors used in an effort to copy the hues
on an expanse of desert before him; beginning with the foreground, these
were brown, dark red, violet, blue, gold, rose, crimson, pale green,
orange, indigo blue, and sky blue. Colors supply the place of shadows,
for there is no shade anywhere; all is wide open and light; and yet the
expanse does not strike one in the least as bare. For myself, I can say
that of all the marvels which one sees in Egypt, the desert produced the
most profound impression; and I fancy that, as regards this feeling, I
am but one of many. The cause of the attraction is a mystery. It cannot
be found in the roving tendencies of our ancestor, since he was
arboreal, and there are no trees in the strange-tinted waste. The old
legend says that Adam's first wife, Lilith, fled to Egypt, where she was
permitted to li