ected and it is expected, yet the sight
causes extraordinary emotion and surprise. It is impossible to describe
the effect produced by that vaporous outline so faint that it almost
melts into the colour of the sky, and that, if one had not been
forewarned, it might escape notice. Neither years nor barbarians have
been able to overthrow these artificial mountains, the most gigantic
monuments, except, perhaps, the Tower of Babel, ever raised by man. For
five thousand years they have been standing there,--almost as old as the
world, according to the biblical account. Even our own civilisation,
with its powerful methods of destruction, could scarcely manage to tear
them down. The pyramids have seen ages and dynasties flow by like
billows of sand, and the colossal Sphinx with its noseless face ever
smiles at their feet with its ironical and mysterious smile. Even after
they were opened they kept their secret, and yielded up but the bones of
oxen by the side of an empty sarcophagus. Eyes that have been closed so
long that Europe, perchance, had not emerged from the flood when those
eyes beheld the light, gazed upon them from where I am; they are
contemporaneous with vanished empires, with strange races of men since
swept from the surface of the earth; they have beheld civilisations that
we know nothing of; heard spoken the tongues which men seek to make out
in hieroglyphics, known manners which would appear to us as strange as a
dream. They have been there so long that the stars have changed their
places, and they belong to a past so prodigiously fabulous that behind
them the dawn of the world seems to shine.

While these thoughts flashed through my mind we were rapidly approaching
Cairo,--Cairo, of which I had talked so often with poor Gerard de
Nerval, with Gustave Flaubert, and Maxime Du Camp, whose tales had
excited my curiosity to the highest pitch. In the case of cities which
one has desired to see from childhood, and which one has long inhabited
in dreams, one is apt to conceive a fantastic notion which it is very
difficult to efface, even in presence of reality. The sight of an
engraving, of a picture, often forms a starting-point. My Cairo, built
out of the materials of the "Thousand and One Nights," centred around
the Ezbekiyeh Place, the strange painting of which Marilhat had sent
from Egypt to one of the first exhibitions which followed the Revolution
of July. Unless I am mistaken, it was his first picture, and wha