Except For
The Phantasmagoria Of The Mornings And Evenings, There Is No
Outstanding Feature On These Dull-Coloured Banks, Where May Be Seen,
With Never A Change At All, The Humble Pastoral Life Of The Fellahs.
The Sun Is Burning, The Starlit Nights Clear And Cold.
A withering
wind, which blows almost without ceasing from the north, makes you
shiver as soon as the twilight falls.
One may travel for league after league along this slimy water and make
head for days and weeks against its current - which glides
everlastingly past the dahabiya, in little hurrying waves - without
seeing this warm, fecundating river, compared with which our rivers of
France are mere negligible streams, either diminish or increase or
hasten. And on the right and left of us as we pass are unfolded
indefinitely the two parallel chains of barren limestone, which
imprison so narrowly the Egypt of the harvests: on the west that of
the Libyan desert, which every morning the first rays of the sun tint
with a rosy coral that nothing seems to dull; and in the east that of
the desert of Arabia, which never fails in the evening to retain the
light of the setting sun, and looks then like a mournful girdle of
glowing embers. Sometimes the two parallel walls sheer off and give
more room to the green fields, to the woods of palm-trees, and the
little oases, separated by streaks of golden sand. Sometimes they
approach so closely to the Nile that habitable Egypt is no wider than
some two or three poor fields of corn, lying right on the water's
edge, behind which the dead stones and the dead sands commence at
once.
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