When I Went Back To Egypt, After A Lapse Of Many Years, I Fled At Once
From Cairo, And Upon
The long reaches of the Nile, in the great spaces
of the Libyan Desert, in the luxuriant palm-grooves of
The Fayyum,
among the tamarisk-bushes and on the pale waters of Kurun, I forgot
the changes which, in my brief glimpse of the city and its environs,
had moved me to despondency. But one cannot live in the solitudes for
ever. And at last from Madi-nat-al-Fayyum, with the first pilgrims
starting for Mecca, I returned to the great city, determined to seek
in it once more for the fascinations it used to hold, and perhaps
still held in the hidden ways where modern feet, nearly always in a
hurry, had seldom time to penetrate.
A mist hung over the land. Out of it, with a sort of stern energy,
there came to my ears loud hymns sung by the pilgrim voices - hymns in
which, mingled with the enthusiasm of devotees en route for the
holiest shrine of their faith, there seemed to sound the resolution of
men strung up to confront the fatigues and the dangers of a great
journey through a wild and unknown country. Those hymns led my feet to
the venerable mosques of Cairo, the city of mosques, guided me on my
lesser pilgrimage among the cupolas and the colonnades, where grave
men dream in the silence near marble fountains, or bend muttering
their prayers beneath domes that are dimmed by the ruthless fingers of
Time.
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