But all at once there comes a noisy chattering in a Teutonic tongue—­and shouts and laughs! . . .  How is it possible, so near to the great dead? . . .  And there enters a group of tourists, dressed more or less in the approved “smart” style.  A guide, with a droll countenance, recites to them the beauties of the place, bellowing at the top of his voice like a showman at a fair.  And one of the travellers, stumbling in the sandals which are too large for her small feet, laughs a prolonged, silly little laugh like the clucking of a turkey. . . .

Is there then no keeper, no guardian of this holy mosque?  And amongst the faithful prostrate here in prayer, none who will rise and make indignant protest?  Who after this will speak to us of the fanaticism of the Egyptians? . . .  Too meek, rather, they seem to me everywhere.  Take any church you please in Europe where men go down on their knees in prayer, and I should like to see what kind of a welcome would be accorded to a party of Moslem tourists who—­to suppose the impossible—­behaved so badly as these savages here.

Behind the mosque is an esplanade, and beyond that the palace.  The palace, as such, can scarcely be said to exist any longer, for it has been turned into a barrack for the army of occupation.  English soldiers, indeed, meet us at every turn, smoking their pipes in the idleness of the evening.  One of them who does not smoke is trying to carve his name with a knife on one of the layers of marble at the base of the sanctuary.

At the end of this esplanade there is a kind of balcony from which one may see the whole of the town, and an unlimited extent of verdant plains and yellow desert.  It is a favourite view of the tourists of the agencies, and we meet again our friends of the mosque, who have preceded us hither—­the gentlemen with the loud voices, the bellowing guide and the cackling lady.  Some soldiers are standing there too, smoking their pipes contemplatively.  But spite of all these people, in spite, too, of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on arrival there is ravishing.

A very fairyland—­but a fairyland quite different from that of Stamboul.  For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre above the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is spread out simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert and dominated by chaotic rocks.  Thousands of minarets rise up on every side like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can see their innumerable slender points—­but instead of being simply, as at Stamboul, so many white spires, they are here complicated by arabesques, by galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to have borrowed the reddish colour of the desert.

The flat rocks tell of a region which formerly was without rain.  The innumerable palm-trees of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and houses, sway their plumes in the wind, bewildered as it were by these clouds laden with cold showers.  In the south and in the west, at the extreme limits of the view, as if upon the misty horizon of the plains, appear two gigantic triangles.  They are Gizeh and Memphis—­the eternal pyramids.