Some
danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up. The Great Pyramid
of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and gleamed like a
marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at El-Outaya, in
Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until at last I
could see only a small section with its top, which looked almost as
pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones in the
golden eye of the sun - Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and to
serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb it.
Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
between the little sphinxes.
Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer,
more amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of
the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from
tomb to tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great
galleries beneath the sands, creeping through tubes of stone,
crouching almost on hands and knees in the sultry chambers of the
dead, the awfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of race
comes, like a cloud, upon your spirit.
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