Black were the birds that flew low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black the meeting leaves of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel from where I stood to Mena House.  And presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, and near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than it, but scarcely less mysterious.  The gold deepened, glowed more fiercely.  In the sky above the Pyramids hung tiny cloud wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as the gossamers of Tunis.  As I turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first lights glittering across the fields of doura, silvery white, like diamonds.  But the silver did not call me.  My imagination was held captive by the gold.  I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail’s road, toward it.  And I dwelt in it many days.

The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the spirits’ eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.  Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down, penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king’s chamber, listen to the silence there, feel it with your hands—­is it not tangible in this hot fastness of incorruptible death?—­creep, like the surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed, though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land it dowered, a life perpetual.  Now you know the Great Pyramid.  You know that you can climb it, that you can enter it.  You have seen it from all sides, under all aspects.  It is familiar to you.

No, it can never be that.  With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx, it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock and stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like the soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin retreating from you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.

II

THE SPHINX

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx—­a bird like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue somewhere on its wings.  When I came to the edge of the sand basin where perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone.  The bird flew near the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying now low, now high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it, which held it, from which it surely longed to extract some sign of recognition.