the vague horizon of Arabia beyond.

They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
where the Mameluke Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three hundred
years, sleep now in complete abandonment. Nowadays, it is true, some
visits are beginning to be paid to them--on winter nights when the moon
is full and they throw on the sands their great clear-cut shadows. At
such times the light is considered favourable, and they rank among the
curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of tourists (who persist
in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake themselves thither of
an evening--a noisy caravan mounted on little donkeys. But to-night
the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall no doubt be alone in
troubling them in their ghostly communion.

To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most massive
objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But nevertheless
it shows their detail and leaves them something of their daylight
colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the ruins of the
mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved their reddish or
brown colours, although the sand which separates them, and makes between
the tombs of the different sultans little dead solitudes, remains pale
and wan.

And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding always without noise, traces
on this same sand little furrows which the wind will have effaced by
to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
useless as they are impossible to make. You may pass here where you
like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
beings. The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a moon
of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.

Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from
a distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with denticulated
trefoils of exquisite fashioning.

But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mame