e a man to break an
engagement to dine with her rival! Queen of the Lotus! Empress of the
Pyramids! What grace, what charm I anticipated! I wondered if she
would be portrayed floating down to meet Antony, with her purple and
perfumed sails, her cloth of gold garments, her peacocks, her ibex,
her lotus-blooms, and if all her mysterious fascinations would be
spread before the delighted gaze of her humble worshipper.

What I found is shown in the frontispiece to this volume. Beauty
unadorned with a vengeance! From this time on I shall question the
taste of Antony. I only wish he could have lived to see some American
girls I know.

We saw Karnak and Philae by moonlight, and we lunched in the tombs of
the kings, with hieroglyphics thousands of years old looking down upon
our pickled onions and cold fowl, and we ploughed through the sands at
Assouan and saw the naked Nubians, with a silver ear-ring in the top
of their left ear, shoot the rapids of the first cataract. We stood,
too, in the temple of Luxor, before the altar of Hathor, with the
sunset on one side and the moonrise on the other, and heard what her
votaries say to the Goddess of Beauty. It was so mystical that we
almost joined in the worship of the Egyptian Venus Aphrodite. It was
so still, so majestic, so aloof from everything modern and new.

The Nile is essentially a river of silence and mystery. The ibis is
always to be seen, standing alone, seemingly absorbed in meditation.
The camels turn their beautiful soft eyes upon you as if you were
intruding upon their silence and reserve. Never were the eyes in a
human head so beautiful as a camel's. There is a limpid softness, an
appealing plaintiveness in their expression which drags at your
sympathies like the look in the eyes of a hunchback. It means that,
with your opportunities, you might have done more with your life. Your
mother looks at you that way sometimes in church, when the sermon
touches a particularly raw nerve in your spiritual make-up. I always
feel like apologizing when a camel looks at me.

One moonlight night was so bright that our boat started about three
o'clock instead of waiting for daylight, and the start swung my
state-room door open. It was so warm that I let it remain, and lay
there hearing the gentle swish of the water curling against the side
of the steamer, and seeing the soft moonlight form a silver pathway
from the yellow bank across the river to my cabin door. The machinery
made