pityingly explained away, had once been genuine pathways of approach.
But never yet, and least of all in his previous visits to Egypt itself,
had he discovered one single person, worthy of speech, who caught at his
idea. "Curious," they said, then turned away--to go on digging in the
sand. Sand smothered her world to-day. Excavators discovered skeletons.
Museums everywhere stored them--grinning, literal relics that told
nothing.

But now, while he packed and sang, these hopes of enthusiastic younger
days stirred again--because the emotion that gave them birth was real
and true in him. Through the morning mists upon the Nile an old pyramid
bowed hugely at him across London roofs: "Come," he heard its awful
whisper beneath the ceiling, "I have things to show you, and to tell."
He saw the flock of them sailing the Desert like weird grey solemn ships
that make no earthly port. And he imagined them as one: multiple
expressions of some single unearthly portent they adumbrated in mighty
form--dead symbols of some spiritual conception long vanished from the
world.

"I mustn't dream like this," he laughed, "or I shall get absent-minded
and pack fire-tongs instead of boots. It looks like a jumble sale
already!" And he stood on a heap of things to wedge them down still
tighter.

But the pictures would not cease. He saw the kites circling high in the
blue air. A couple of white vultures flapped lazily away over shining
miles. Felucca sails, like giant wings emerging from the ground, curved
towards him from the Nile. The palm-trees dropped long shadows over
Memphis. He felt the delicious, drenching heat, and the Khamasin, that
over-wind from Nubia, brushed his very cheeks. In the little gardens the