grassy fields, leads us at length under a large ruinous portico--a
relic of goodness knows what olden days--which still rises here, quite
isolated, altogether strange and unexpected, in the midst of the green
expanse of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from a great distance, so
pure and clear is the air; and in approaching it we perceive that it is
colossal, and in relief on its lintel is designed a globe with two long
wings outspread symmetrically.

It behoves us now to make obeisance with almost religious reverence, for
this winged disc is a symbol which gives at length an indication of
the place immediate and absolute. It is Egypt, the country--Egypt,
our ancient mother. And there before us must once have stood a temple
reverenced of the people, or some great vanished town; its fragments
of columns and sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields of
lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that this land of ancient splendours,
which never ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously fertile,
should have returned, for some hundreds of years now, to the humble
pastoral life of the peasants.

Through the green crops and the assembled herds our pathway seems to
lead to a kind of hill rising alone in the midst of the plains--a hill
which is neither of the same colour nor the same nature as the mountains
of the surrounding deserts. Behind us the portico recedes little by
little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as mournful and
solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of meadows, which
spread their peace where once was a centre of magnificence.

The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts--the wind of Egypt that never
seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of the
sun. The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its young
quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one another and
turn their backs to the squall.

As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of
ruins. And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are the
remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here for
some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of time in
the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become in time
mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and sometimes
even in the submerging sands.

A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses; a
heap of broken jars or a