For two days the young monk held on, paddling and floating rapidly
down the Nile-stream, leaving city after city to right and left with
longing eyes, and looking back to one villa after another, till the
reaches of the banks hid them from his sight, with many a yearning
to know what sort of places those gay buildings and gardens would
look like on a nearer view, and what sort of life the thousands led
who crowdedthe busy quays, and walked and drove, in an endless
stream, along the great highroads which ran along either bank. He
carefully avoided every boat that passed him, from the gilded barge
of the wealthy landlord or merchant, to the tiny raft buoyed up with
empty jars, which was floating down to be sold at some market in the
Delta. Here and there he met and hailed a crew of monks, drawing
their nets in a quiet bay, or passing along the great watery highway
from monastery to monastery: but all the news he received from them
was, that the canal of Alexandria was still several days' journey
below him. It seemed endless, that monotonous vista of the two high
clay banks, with their sluices and water-wheels, their knots of
palms and date-trees; endless seemed that wearisome succession of
bars of sand and banks of mud, every one like the one before it,
every one dotted with the same line of logs and stones strewn along
the water's edge, which turned out as he approached them to be
basking crocodiles and sleeping pelicans. His eye, wearied with the
continual confinement and want of distance, longed for the boundless
expanse of the desert, for the jagged outlines of those far-off
hills, which he had watched from boyhood rising mysteriously at morn
out of the eastern sky, and melting mysteriously into it again at
even, beyond which dwelt a whole world of wonders, elephants and
dragons, satyrs and anthropophagi,--ay, and the phoenix itself.
Tired and melancholy, his mind returned inward to prey on itself,