I said, in
a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell upon my ears.
But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten certain bazaars of
Cairo.
But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The
golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their
blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with their
tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking down on
the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the Pyramids
with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits somewhere near
the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the enigma of human
life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the temples; the great
desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.
Egypt calls--even across the space of the world; and across the space
of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its summons,
because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of sand,
and ruins, and gold"; the land of the charmed serpent, the land of the
afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains of Libya,
but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it from the
base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon; the land
that has a spell--wonderful, beautiful Egypt.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spell of Egypt, by Robert Hichens
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPELL OF EGYPT ***
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