through it, their ends lost to sight at the shimmering horizon.

Even at this noon hour when the world should have been eating lotuses
or luncheon, the interminable arbour was crowded with strings of
camels, forever going both ways, into Cairo and out, one wondered why
--and there were flocks of woolly brown sheep, and donkeys drawing
sideless carts in which whole families of veiled women and half-naked
children were seated tailor fashion. On we spun, past the Zoo, past
scattered villas of Frenchified, Oriental fashion which might have been
designed by a confectioner: past azure lakes left by the ebbing Nile,
and so into sudden dazzling sight of three geometric mountains in a
tawny desert--two, monsters in size, and one a baby trying to catch up
with them.

"Oh!" everybody breathed. For these things were beyond words.

Then in a moment more the Great Pyramid had grown so big that it loomed
over us, and ate up half the sky--a pyre of yellow flame against a
flame of blue.

We were at the end of the shadowy road that leads like a causeway to
the desert, and on the verge of the golden, billowing sea which flows
round the Pyramids and engulfs the distant Sphinx. Oriental life
encircled us, in the foreground of the picture--a long row of waiting
camels gaily saddled and tasselled, delicately nibbling bersim green as
heaped emeralds--donkeys white and gray, beribboned and beaded--small
yellow sandcarts; little white, desert horses and tall brown, desert
men; camels snarling, donkeys braying, horses whinnying, and men
touting. "Very nice sandcarts--very nice camels! Take ladies and
gentlemen quick to Pyramids and Sphinx or Petrified Forest!" Farther