o their
masters' homes the water drawn from the Nile in jars that were hung from
a stick placed on their shoulder. Although they wore nothing but striped
drawers wrinkling on their hips, their torsos, brilliant and polished
like basalt, streamed with perspiration as they quickened their pace
lest they should scorch the thick soles of their feet on the pavements,
which were as hot as the floor of a vapour bath. The boatmen were asleep
in the cabins of their boats moored to the brick wall of the river quay,
sure that no one would waken them to cross to the other bank, where lay
the Memnonia quarter. In the highest heaven wheeled vultures, whose
shrill call, that at any other time would have been lost in the rumour
of the city, could be plainly heard in the general silence. On the
cornices of the monuments two or three ibises, one leg drawn up under
their body, their long bill resting on their breast, seemed to be
meditating deeply, and stood out against the calcined, whitish blue
which formed the background.

And yet all did not sleep. From the walls of a great palace whose
entablature, adorned with palmettoes, made a long, straight line against
the flaming sky, there came a faint murmur of music. These bursts of
harmony spread now and then through the diaphanous shimmer of the
atmosphere, and the eye might almost have followed their sonorous
undulations. Deadened by the thickness of the walls, the music was
strangely sweet. It was a song voluptuously sad, wearily languorous,
expressing bodily fatigue and the discouragement of passion. It was full
of the eternal weariness of the luminous azure, of the indescribable
helplessness of hot countries. As the slave passed by the wall,
forgetting the master's lash he would suspend his walk and stop to
breathe in that song, impregnated with all the secret homesickness of
the soul, which made him think of his far distant country, of his lost
love, and of the insurmountable obstacles of fate. Whence came that
song, that sigh softly breathed in the silence of the city? What
restless soul was awake when all around was asleep?

The straight lines and the monumental appearance of the facade of the
palace, which looked upon the face of the square, were typical of the
civil and religious architecture of Egypt. The dwelling could belong to
a princely or a priestly family only. So much was readily seen from the
materials of which it was built, the careful construction, and the
richness of