He was very right.  The purple and lemon-coloured hazes of dusk and reflected day spread over the throbbing, twinkling streets, masked the great outline of the citadel and the desert hills, and conspired to confuse and suggest and evoke memories, till Cairo the Sorceress cast her proper shape and danced before me in the heartbreaking likeness of every city I had known and loved, a little farther up the road.

It was a cruel double-magic.  For in the very hour that my homesick soul had surrendered itself to the dream of the shadow that had turned back on the dial, I realised all the desolate days and homesickness of all the men penned in far-off places among strange sounds and smells.

IV

UP THE RIVER

Once upon a time there was a murderer who got off with a life-sentence.  What impressed him most, when he had time to think, was the frank boredom of all who took part in the ritual.

‘It was just like going to a doctor or a dentist,’ he explained. ’You come to ’em very full of your affairs, and then you discover that it’s only part of their daily work to them.  I expect,’ he added, ’I should have found it the same if—­er—­I’d gone on to the finish.’

He would have.  Break into any new Hell or Heaven and you will be met at its well-worn threshold by the bored experts in attendance.

For three weeks we sat on copiously chaired and carpeted decks, carefully isolated from everything that had anything to do with Egypt, under chaperonage of a properly orientalised dragoman.  Twice or thrice daily, our steamer drew up at a mud-bank covered with donkeys.  Saddles were hauled out of a hatch in our bows; the donkeys were dressed, dealt round like cards:  we rode off through crops or desert, as the case might be, were introduced in ringing tones to a temple, and were then duly returned to our bridge and our Baedekers.  For sheer comfort, not to say padded sloth, the life was unequalled, and since the bulk of our passengers were citizens of the United States—­Egypt in winter ought to be admitted into the Union as a temporary territory—­there was no lack of interest.  They were overwhelmingly women, with here and there a placid nose-led husband or father, visibly suffering from congestion of information about his native city.  I had the joy of seeing two such men meet.  They turned their backs resolutely on the River, bit and lit cigars, and for one hour and a quarter ceased not to emit statistics of the industries, commerce, manufacture, transport, and journalism of their towns;—­Los Angeles, let us say, and Rochester, N.Y.  It sounded like a duel between two cash-registers.

One forgot, of course, that all the dreary figures were alive to them, and as Los Angeles spoke Rochester visualised.  Next day I met an Englishman from the Soudan end of things, very full of a little-known railway which had been laid down in what had looked like raw desert, and therefore had turned out to be full of paying freight.  He was in the full-tide of it when Los Angeles ranged alongside and cast anchor, fascinated by the mere roll of numbers.