before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed
to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was after four in the
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that
the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--moved me as few, rare
things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the
long road--Ismail's road--that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the
Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured
me.

It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a
tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in
the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses
in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.
In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the
palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously reappearing among
their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing moved slowly, wading
homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo,
two donkeys, followed by boys who held with brown hands their dark blue
skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his
quickly stepping horse. At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons
of Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in
the water, and growing to its edge, the pale sands that, far as the
eyes could see, from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward
the west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise
where men grow drowsy in well-being, and dream away the years. And
then I looked farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw
a Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it
saluted me after all my years of absence. Later I was to see it grey as