striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their
merchandise. From the Delta they bring thousands of panniers of fruit,
and from Upper Egypt and from Nubia all manner of strange and precious
things which are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are
sold to many a traveller at prices which, to put it mildly, bring to the
sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one leave his heart, he leaves
also not seldom his skin. The goblin men of the great goblin market of
Cairo take all, and remain unsatisfied and calling for more. I said, in
a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell upon my ears.
But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten certain bazaars of
Cairo.

But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The
golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their
blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with their
tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking down on
the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the Pyramids
with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits somewhere near
the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the enigma of human
life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the temples; the great
desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.

Egypt calls--even across the space of the world; and across the space
of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its summons,
because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of sand,
and ruins, and gold"; the land of the charmed serpent, the land of the
afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains of Libya,
but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it from the
base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon; the land
that has a spell--wonderful, beautiful Egypt.

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