ve in the desert, and where she still exists:

"It was Lilith, the wife of Adam;
Not a drop of her blood was human."

Perhaps it is Lilith's magic that we feel.

[Illustration: THE INUNDATION NEAR CAIRO]

Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, the On of the forty-first chapter of
Genesis, is five miles from Cairo. Nothing of it is now left above
ground save an obelisk and a few ruined walls. The obelisk, which is the
oldest yet discovered, bears the name of the king in whose reign it was
erected; this gives us the date--5000 years ago; that is, more than a
millennium before the days of Moses. At Heliopolis was the Temple of the
Sun, and the schools which Herodotus visited "because the teachers are
considered the most accomplished men in Egypt." When Strabo came hither,
four hundred years later, he saw the house which Plato had occupied;
Moses here learned "all the wisdom of the Egyptians." Papyri describe
Heliopolis as "full of obelisks." Two of these columns were carried to
Alexandria 1937 years ago, and set up before the Temple of Caesar.
According to one authority, this temple was built by Cleopatra; in
any case, the two obelisks acquired the name of Cleopatra's Needles, and
though the temple itself in time disappeared, they remained where they
had been placed--one erect, one prostrate--until, in recent years, one
was given to London and the other to New York. One recites all this in a
breath in order to bring up, if possible, the associations which rush
confusedly through the mind as one stands beside this red granite column
rising alone in the green fields at Heliopolis. No myth itself, it was
erected in days which are to us mythical--days which are the jumping-off
place of our human history; yet they were not savages who polished this
granite, who sculptured this inscription; ages of civilization of a
certain sort must have preceded them. Beginning with the Central Park,
we force our minds backward in an endeavor to make these dates real.
"Homer was a modern compared with the designers of this pillar," we say
to ourselves. "The Mycenae relics were _articles de Paris_ of centuries
and centuries later." But repeating the words (and even rolling the
_r's_) are useless efforts; the imagination will not rise; it is crushed
into stupidity by such a vista of years. As reaction, perhaps as
revenge, we flee to geology and Darwin; here, at least, one can take
breath.

Near Heliopolis there is an ostrich yard. The gia