Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly by moonlight
after watching the sunset from the summit of the great pylon. That was a
pageant worth more than the Khedive's.
I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often
known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the Sahara
spaces. But here I was not confronted with an immensity of nature, but
with a gleaming river and an immensity of man. Beneath me was the native
village, in the heart of daylight dusty and unkempt, but now becoming
charged with velvety beauty, with the soft and heavy mystery that at
evening is born among great palm-trees. Along the path that led from
it, coming toward the avenue of sphinxes with ram's-heads that watch for
ever before the temple door, a great white camel stepped, its rider a
tiny child with a close, white cap upon his head. The child was singing
to the glory of the sunset, or was it to the glory of Amun, "the hidden
one," once the local god of Thebes, to whom the grandest temple in
the world was dedicated? I listen to the childish, quavering voice,
twittering almost like a bird, and one word alone came up to me--the
word one hears in Egypt from all the lips that speak and sing: from the
Nubians round their fires at night, from the little boatmen of the lower
reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins of the desert, and the donkey
boys of the villages, from the sheikh who reads one's future in water
spilt on a plate, and the Bisharin with buttered curls who runs to sell
one beads from his tent among the sand-dunes.
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