the desert. In the frightful course of the centuries, as
they unrolled before him, he seized upon the guidance of Herodotus,
to whom the monuments of Egypt had seemed as incalculably old as they
did to him. The choice, however, had proved unfortunate for his
sympathetic reading of Egyptian history. Dwelling on the radiant
progress towards truth and beauty of a free race, bondsmen only to
law and reason, younger brothers of bright gods, he became
querulously critical of a race whose Pharaohs strangled life in the
thought of death and eternity, prostrated themselves before gods in
monstrous shapes, and produced art at the expense of human
well-being.

The landscape of Egypt also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was
exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or
tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight,
and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had
slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the
daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber
of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the
silver bloom spread over the sand dunes, he felt suddenly a great
terror. The golden apples of his western labour, the hard-won fruits
of his stern young virtue, were slipping out of his grasp. The white
desert lay upon his spirit like mist upon the sea, obliterating the
promised course. Desires, unknown before, crept in upon him over the
waves of the sand. All that he had rejected claimed him. All that
he had thought holy mocked him. The next day he hurried to Alexandria
and, recoiling from the library he had planned to visit, took the
first ship to Greece.

He had landed a week ago. To-day's excursion, offering a pleasant
comradeship with those of his own race in a strange land, came almost
opportunely, he fancied, to break an exalted mood. He had found
himself roused to the uttermost by his first impressions of Athens.
Put to flight by the seduction of river and desert, it was the
influence of the landscape rather than of art and history to which
he was here first made sensitive. Sea, mountains and plain were
informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness
of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human
life. He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain
in the harmonies of outline and colour. Idyllic scenes he had already
run across in his walks out f