How True This Is You
Feel As You Look At The Great Pyramid By Night.
It seems to breathe
out mystery.
The immense base recalls to you the labyrinth within; the
long descent from the tiny slit that gives you entrance, your
uncertain steps in its hot, eternal night, your falls on the ice-like
surfaces of its polished blocks of stone, the crushing weight that
seemed to lie on your heart as you stole uncertainly on, summoned
almost as by the desert; your sensation of being for ever imprisoned,
taken and hidden by a monster from Egypt's wonderful light, as you
stood in the central chamber, and realized the stone ocean into whose
depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared deliberately to come.
And then your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking walls till they
reach the dark point which is the top. There you stood with Abou, who
spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of the sun, bathed
in light and air that perhaps came to you from the Gold Coast. And you
saw men and camels like flies, and Cairo like a grey blur, and the
Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. The mosque of
Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned over. Far below slept the dead in
that graveyard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand, its
palm, its "Sycamores of the South," once worshipped and regarded as
Hathor's living body. And beyond them on one side were the sleeping
waters, with islands small, surely, as delicate Egyptian hands, and on
the other the great desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, on and
on "for a march of a thousand days."
That base and that summit - what suggestion and what mystery in their
contrast! What sober, eternal beauty in the dark line which unites
them, now sharply, yet softly, defined against the night, which is
purple as the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul
irresistibly from earth to the stars.
III
SAKKARA
It was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara,
after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second
Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who
very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached
the top was an "American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first
visit to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad
foot, and declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid.
He had been up and down without a guide; he had disturbed the jackal
which lives near its summit, and which I saw running in the sunshine
as Ali drew near its lair, and he was satisfied to rest on his
immortal laurels. To the Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark Twain's world-
wide celebrity is owing to one fact alone: he is the only Roumi who
has climbed the second Pyramid.
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