, which in the end at least disclosed
itself in its true character, we are involved again in the continuation
of the mysterious town, which takes us back into its network. Little
houses follow one another as before, only now the little gardens are
replaced by little burial enclosures. And everything grows more and more
indistinct, in the gentle light, which gradually grows less. It is as if
someone were putting frosted globes over the moon, so that soon, but for
the transparency of this air of Egypt and the prevailing whiteness of
things, there would be no light at all. Once at a window the light of a
lamp appears; it is the lantern of gravediggers. Anon we hear the voices
of men chanting a prayer; and the prayer is a prayer for the dead.

These tenantless houses were never built for dwellings. They are simply
places where men assemble on certain anniversaries, to pray for the
dead. Every Moslem family of any note has its little temple of this
kind, near to the family graves. And there are so many of them that now
the place is become a town--and a town in the desert--that is to say, in
a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place indeed, for we
may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor tombs runs no risk of
being coveted--not even in the irreverent times of the future. No, it is
on the other side of Cairo--on the other bank of the Nile, amongst the
verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look for the suburb in course
of transformation, with its villas of the invading foreigner, and the
myriad electric lights along its motor roads. On this side there is no
such fear; the peace and desuetude are eternal; and the winding sheet of
the Arabian sands is ready always for its burial office.

At the end of this town of the dead, the desert again opens before us
its mournful whitened expanse. On such a night as this, when the wind
blows cold and the misty moon shows like a sad opal, it looks like a
steppe under snow.

But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the ghosts of mosques; a
whole colony of high tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard on the
shifting extent of the sands. And what strange old-fashioned domes they
are! The archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the first,
as much as their isolation in such a place. They look like bells, or
gigantic dervish hats placed on pedestals, and those farthest away give
the impression of squat, large-headed figures posted there as sentinels,
watching