The islands rising from
this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the palms and their
shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were the birds that flew
low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black the meeting leaves
of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel from where I stood to Mena
House. And presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, and
near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than it, but scarcely less
mysterious. The gold deepened, glowed more fiercely. In the sky above
the Pyramids hung tiny cloud wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as
the gossamers of Tunis. As I turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first
lights glittering across the fields of doura, silvery white, like
diamonds. But the silver did not call me. My imagination was held
captive by the gold. I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under
the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail's road, toward it. And I dwelt in it
many days.
The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the
spirits' eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher
till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.
Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down,
penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king's chamber, listen to the
silence there, feel it with your hands--is it not tangible in this hot
fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like the surreptitious midget
you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished
stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off
pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter
of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man
has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed,
though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land
it dowered, a life perpetual.
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