It Is Alone In The Blue Void, And
Seems To Make More Peaceful, And Even A Little Mysterious, The
Wonderful
Light of the fields we traverse - these fields intoxicated
with life and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by
Contrast, the
distant landscape, unshaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more
incisive clearness and the desert beyond seems deluged with rays.
The pathway that we have been following, ill defined as it is in the
grassy fields, leads us at length under a large ruinous portico - a
relic of goodness knows what olden days - which still rises here, quite
isolated, altogether strange and unexpected, in the midst of the green
expanse of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from a great distance,
so pure and clear is the air; and in approaching it we perceive that
it is colossal, and in relief on its lintel is designed a globe with
two long wings outspread symmetrically.
It behoves us now to make obeisance with almost religious reverence,
for this winged disc is a symbol which gives at length an indication
of the place immediate and absolute. It is Egypt, the country - Egypt,
our ancient mother. And there before us must once have stood a temple
reverenced of the people, or some great vanished town; its fragments
of columns and sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields of
lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that this land of ancient
splendours, which never ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously
fertile, should have returned, for some hundreds of years now, to the
humble pastoral life of the peasants.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 109 of 206
Words from 29360 to 29626
of 55391
