and desert dilettanti, have affixed every kind of adjective to Egypt's
music.

Ethereal, melancholy, wailing, plaintive, nebulous, and pathetic are
but a few. Why--why try to tie a label to something which slips from
the fingers even as they close about it? Why _try_ to describe that
which cannot be described? There is, or was, a certain line which in
the heat of an Egyptian noon, or the stillness of an Egyptian night,
when the first notes of a human voice, or stringed instrument, or
rudely cut pipe-reed reach the ears, would creep out of some memory
cell.

One loved the vagueness of those words:

"Out of the nowhere, into here!"

Loved the infinite space they opened up with their aloofness and
indefiniteness, until, alas! they took concrete shape when chosen as
title to the picture of a robust, Royal Academy, Fed-on-Virol looking
babe, which doubtless, when trying to grab some passing Olympian
butterfly, fell off the lap of the Gods into a sitting position upon
Mother Earth.

Also, one thinks of that mist wraith which on a cloudless day stretched
across some mountain's breast, lies lightly upon the air, with
diaphanous ends coming out of and going into nothingness; for in just
such manner does the music fall across an Egyptian day or night.

These catches of music have no end, and no beginning; they rise, linger
a moment, and are gone, leaving behind them an indescribable loneliness