Oh, That Egypt Could Be Kept As It Is, Even As It Is Now; That Philae
Could Be Preserved Even As It Is Now!
The spoilers are there, those
blithe modern spirits, so frightfully clever and capable, so
industrious, so determined, so unsparing of themselves and - of others!
Already they are at work "benefiting Egypt." Tall chimneys begin to
vomit smoke along the Nile.
A damnable tram-line for little trolleys
leads one toward the wonderful colossi of Memnon. Close to Kom Ombos
some soul imbued with romance has had the inspiration to set up - a
factory! And Philae - is it to go?
Is beauty then of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey
of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be
left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of improvement? I
suppose nothing.
Then let those who still care to dream go now to Philae's painted
chamber by the long reaches of the Nile; go on, if they will, to the
giant forms of Abu-Simbel among the Nubian sands. And perhaps they
will think with me, that in some dreams there is a value greater than
the value that is entered in any bank-book, and they will say, with
me, however uselessly:
"Leave to the world some dreams, some places in which to dream; for if
it needs dams to make the grain grow in the stretches of land that
were barren, and railways and tram-lines, and factory chimneys that
vomit black smoke in the face of the sun, surely it needs also painted
chambers of Philae and the silence that comes down from Isis."
XVIII
OLD CAIRO
By Old Cairo I do not mean only /le vieux Caire/ of the guide-book,
the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic church of
Abu Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are said
to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury
of King Herod; but the Cairo that is not new, that is not dedicated
wholly to officialdom and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and
the advance of civilisation - civilisation that does so much harm as
well as so much good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces
beauty with the other - preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial
turmult; that stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the
Western man, even in the midst of what seems, perhaps, like intimacy;
Eastern to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the
vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of the West beat about it like
waves about some unyielding wall of the sea.
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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 61 of 71
Words from 31147 to 31667
of 36756
