Paulus, too limited to be himself a formative influence, was also too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was fitted to lead.  Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires of the world rather than drearily to warm them at burnt out ashes.  Hopeless in Rome, he determined to seek his fortune elsewhere.  An intellectual life real enough to claim his spendthrift allegiance, this, concretely, was the prize for which he had set sail from Brindisi two months before.

The act gave him an outward resemblance to the horde of young bloods who were always swinging out on the high seas in search of sport and adventure.  The most restless made for Britain and the shores of the Euxine or the Baltic, or for the interior of Syria and Persia.  The larger number followed the beaten and luxurious paths to Egypt, where they plunged into the gaieties of Alexandria and, cursorily enough, saw the sights of Memphis and Thebes.  Paulus also went to Egypt.  But in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions, he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past.  Pilgrim rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the colossi of the desert.  In the frightful course of the centuries, as they unrolled before him, he seized upon the guidance of Herodotus, to whom the monuments of Egypt had seemed as incalculably old as they did to him.  The choice, however, had proved unfortunate for his sympathetic reading of Egyptian history.  Dwelling on the radiant progress towards truth and beauty of a free race, bondsmen only to law and reason, younger brothers of bright gods, he became querulously critical of a race whose Pharaohs strangled life in the thought of death and eternity, prostrated themselves before gods in monstrous shapes, and produced art at the expense of human well-being.

The landscape of Egypt also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was exquisite.  Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight, and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster.  He had slept in the desert one night.  The enamelled turquoise of the daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber of the afterglow gave way to moonlight.  As he lay and watched the silver bloom spread over the sand dunes, he felt suddenly a great terror.  The golden apples of his western labour, the hard-won fruits of his stern young virtue, were slipping out of his grasp.  The white desert lay upon his spirit like mist upon the sea, obliterating the promised course.  Desires, unknown before, crept in upon him over the waves of the sand.  All that he had rejected claimed him.  All that he had thought holy mocked him.  The next day he hurried to Alexandria and, recoiling from the library he had planned to visit, took the first ship to Greece.