I perceived on the right hand and on the left
waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany, Levantine
touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their lean fingers,
an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking chocolate on a
terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to visit monuments
in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I'll be in Scotland
before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed
to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was after four in the
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that
the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--moved me as few, rare
things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the
long road--Ismail's road--that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the
Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured
me.
It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a
tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in
the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses
in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.
In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the
palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously reappearing among
their narrow trunks.
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