had indeed blushed!


II


It was the full season at Cairo. The wealth and fashion of
Bayswater, South Kensington, and even the bosky Wood of the
Evangelist had sent their latest luxury and style to flout the
tombs of the past with the ghastly flippancy of to-day. The cheap
tripper was there--the latest example of the Darwinian theory--
apelike, flea and curio hunting! Shamelessly inquisitive and
always hungry, what did he know of the Sphinx or the pyramids or
the voice--and, for the matter of that, what did they know of him?
And yet he was not half bad in comparison with the "swagger
people,"--these people who pretend to have lungs and what not, and
instead of galloping on merry hunters through the frost and snow of
Piccadilly and Park, instead of enjoying the roaring fires of piled
logs in the evening, at the first approach of winter steal away to
the Land of the Sun, and decline to die, like honest Britons, on
British soil. And then they know nothing of the Egyptians and are
horrified at "bakshish," which they really ought to pay for the
privilege of shocking the straight-limbed, naked-footed Arab in his
single rough garment with their baggy elephant-legged trousers!
And they know nothing of the mystic land of the old gods, filled
with profound enigmas of the supernatural, dark secrets yet
unexplored except in this book. Well might the great Memnon murmur
after this lapse of these thousand years, "They're making me
tired!"