ago seemed to flutter about the giant monument like so many black
moths--they too have gone, made restless by the cold air, which
erstwhile they had not known. The show for to-night is over, and
everywhere silence reigns.

The rosy tint fades on the Sphinx and the pyramids; all things in the
ghostly scene grow visibly paler; for the moon as it rises becomes
more silvery in the increasing chilliness of midnight. The winter mist,
exhaled from the artificially watered fields below, continues to rise,
takes heart and envelops the great mute face itself. And the latter
persists in its regard of the dead moon, preserving still the old
disconcerting smile. It becomes more and more difficult to believe that
here before us is a real colossus, so surely does it seem nothing other
than a dilated reflection of a thing which exists _elsewhere_, in
some other world. And behind in the distance are the three triangular
mountains. Them, too, the fog envelops, till they also cease to exist,
and become pure visions of the Apocalypse.

Now it is that little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed
in those large eyes with their empty sockets--for, at this moment, the
ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many
centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all
these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have
been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single
one of them; and that the creation of mankind--mankind that thinks and
suffers--has had no rational explanation, and that our poor aspirations
are vain, but so vain as to awaken pity.

CHAPTER II

THE PASSING OF CAIRO

Ragged, threatening clouds, like those that bring the showers of our
early spring, hurry across a pale evening sky, whose mere aspect makes
you cold. A wintry wind, raw and bitter, blows without ceasing, and
brings with it every now and then some furtive spots of rain.

A carriage takes me towards what was once the residence of the great
Mehemet Ali: by a steep incline it ascends into the midst of rocks and
sand--and already, and almost in a moment, we seem to be in the desert;
though we have scarcely left behind the last houses of an Arab quarter,
where long-robed folk, who looked half frozen, were muffled up to the
eyes to-day. . . . Was there formerly such weather as this in this
country noted for its unchanging mildness?

This residence of the great sovereign of Egypt,