The Afterglow Was Like An Exquisite Spasm, Is Always Like An Exquisite Spasm, A Beautiful, Almost Desperate Effort Ending In The Quiet Darkness Of Defeat.

And through that spasmodic effort a world lived for some minutes with a life that seemed unreal, startling, magical.

Color returned to the sky - color ethereal, trembling as if it knew it ought not to return. Yet it stayed for a while and even glowed, though it looked always strangely purified, and full of a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were no longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised surely by a supreme artist to heighten here and there the beauty of the sky. Everything that moved against the afterglow - man, woman, child, camel and donkey, dog and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse - became at once an ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius to emphasize, by relieving it, the color in which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched serenely, as if he knew the end. And almost suddenly the miraculous effort failed. Things again revealed their truth, whether commonplace or not. That pool of the Nile was no more a red jewel set in a feathery pattern of strange design, but only water fading from my sight beyond a group of palms. And that below me was only a camel going homeward, and that a child leading a bronze-colored sheep with a curly coat, and that a dusty, flat-roofed hovel, not the fairy home of jinn, or the abode of some magician working marvels with the sun-rays he had gathered in his net.

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