Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more
amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the
sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to
tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath
the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands
and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, the awfulness of the
passing away of dynasties and of race comes, like a cloud, upon your
spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of
Thi, that royal councillor, that scribe and confidant, whose life must
have been passed in a round of serene activities, amid a sneering,
though doubtless admiring, population.
Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
wholly frivolous--for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
that seduces even where it seems grotesque--I took with me a child of
ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked from him
to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the races,
I realized the persistence of type.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25