The great bees hummed, moving slowly in the golden air among the mighty columns, passing slowly among these records of lives long over, but which seemed still to be.  And I looked at the lotus-flowers which the little grotesque hands were holding, had been holding for how many years—­the flowers that typified the rising again of the sun and the divine gift of eternal youth.  And I thought of the bird and the Sphinx, the thing that was whimsical wooing the thing that was mighty.  And I gazed at the immense columns and at the light and little figures all about me.  Bird and Sphinx, delicate whimsicality, calm and terrific power!  In Egypt the dead men have combined them, and the combination has an irresistible fascination, weaves a spell that entrances you in the sunshine and beneath the blinding blue.  At Abydos I knew it.  And I loved the columns that seemed blown out with exuberant strength, and I loved the delicate white walls that, like the lotus-flower, give to the world a youth that seems eternal—­a youth that is never frivolous, but that is full of the divine, and yet pathetic, animation of happy life.

The great bees hummed more drowsily.  I sat quite still in the sun.  And then presently, moved by some prompting instinct, I turned my head, and, far off, through the narrow portal of the temple, I saw the girl-child swathed in purple still lying, sinuously as a young snake, upon the palm-wood roof above the brown earth wall to watch me with her eyes of cloud and fire.

And upon me, like cloud and fire—­cloud of the tombs and the great temple columns, fire of the brilliant life painted and engraved upon them—­there stole the spell of Egypt.

V

THE NILE

I do not find in Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and at first almost bewildered me.  Stranger by far is Morocco, stranger the country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El Kantara.  There I feel very far away, as a child feels distance from dear, familiar things.  I look to the horizon expectant of I know not what magical occurrences, what mysteries.  I am aware of the summons to advance to marvellous lands, where marvellous things must happen.  I am taken by that sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me when first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara.  But Egypt, though it contains so many marvels, has no longer for me the marvellous atmosphere.  Its keynote is seductiveness.

In Egypt one feels very safe.  Smiling policemen in clothes of spotless white—­emblematic, surely, of their innocence!—­seem to be everywhere, standing calmly in the sun.  Very gentle, very tender, although perhaps not very true, are the Bedouins at the Pyramids.  Up the Nile the fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen, smile protectingly upon you, as if they would say, “Allah has placed us here to take care of the confiding stranger.”  No ferocious demands for money fall upon my ears;