" So be it! Longevity
has been, by a happy chance, secured. But what of beauty? What of the
beauty of the past, and what of the schemes for the future? Is
Philae even to be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be
artificially raised still higher, until Philae ceases to be? Soon, no
doubt, an answer will be given.
Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the
water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
thing stricken with some creeping malady--one of those maladies which
begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal--Shellal with
its railway-station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of
screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun,
its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen, Egyptian,
Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the
desert lay all around--the great sands, the great masses of granite
that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into obelisks, and
sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the bend of the river,
dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive beehive of human bees,
sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature and human nature,
rose the fabled "Pharaoh's Bed"; gracious, tender, from Shellal
most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold against the grim
background of the hills on the western shore.
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