desires. Guy de Maupassant has said that of all the arts architecture is
perhaps the most aesthetic, the most mysterious, and the most nourished
by ideas. How true this is you feel as you look at the Great Pyramid by
night. It seems to breathe out mystery. The immense base recalls to you
the labyrinth within; the long descent from the tiny slit that gives you
entrance, your uncertain steps in its hot, eternal night, your falls
on the ice-like surfaces of its polished blocks of stone, the crushing
weight that seemed to lie on your heart as you stole uncertainly on,
summoned almost as by the desert; your sensation of being for ever
imprisoned, taken and hidden by a monster from Egypt's wonderful light,
as you stood in the central chamber, and realized the stone ocean into
whose depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared deliberately to
come. And then your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking walls till they
reach the dark point which is the top. There you stood with Abou, who
spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of the sun, bathed
in light and air that perhaps came to you from the Gold Coast. And
you saw men and camels like flies, and Cairo like a grey blur, and the
Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. The mosque of
Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned over. Far below slept the dead in
that graveyard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand, its palm,
its "Sycamores of the South," once worshipped and regarded as Hathor's
living body. And beyond them on one side were the sleeping waters, with
islands small, surely, as delicate Egyptian hands, and on the other the
great desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, on and on "for a march
of a thousand days."

That base and that summit--what suggestion and what mystery in their
contrast! What sober, eternal beauty in the dark line which unites them,
now sharply, yet softly, defined against the night, which is purple as
the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul irresistibly
from earth to the stars.

III

SAKKARA

It was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara,
after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second
Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who
very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached the
top was an "American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first visit
to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a