The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long
and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever
describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes,
their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their
hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds
make upon them? It is an enchanted _royaume_ of the sands through which
one approaches Isis.
Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious
introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented
Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other
clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Philae, and they have
given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which
tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute--it
cost about a million and a half pounds--and no doubt she ought to be
gratified.
Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her
sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the
walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice,
there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about
her, and make their plaint with hers--their plaint for the peace that
is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a
delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the "Holy
Island."
I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae.
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