and over in the warm and golden grains. Some sat among the graves and
ate. Some sang. Some danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up.
The Great Pyramid of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and
gleamed like a marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at
El-Outaya, in Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until
at last I could see only a small section with its top, which looked
almost as pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones
in the golden eye of the sun--Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and
to serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb
it. Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
between the little sphinxes.

Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more
amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the
sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to
tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath
the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands
and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, the awfulness of the
passing away of dynasties and of race comes, like a cloud, upon your
spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of
Thi, that royal councillor, that scribe and confidant, whose life must
have been passed in a round of serene activities, amid a sneering,
though doubtless admiring, population.