ast I saw the sands that I love creeping
down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them that wonderful
air which belongs only to them--the air that dwells among the dunes in
the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of Liberty upon
the face of a man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as lithe,
tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets flame in the
eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind to the Sloughi. The
true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the
sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, as
I saw to right and left amber curves and sheeny recesses, shining ridges
and bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long
and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever
describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes,
their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their
hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds
make upon them? It is an enchanted _royaume_ of the sands through which
one approaches Isis.

Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious
introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented
Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other
clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Philae, and they have
given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which
tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute--it
cost about a million and a half pounds--and no doubt she ought to be
gratified.

Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her
sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the
walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice,
there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about
her, and make their plaint with hers--their plaint for the peace that
is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a
delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the "Holy
Island."

I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae. I had sweet memories of the
island that had been with me for many years--memories of still mornings
under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or
gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands; memories of
drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly sleeping, and