Some Soldiers Are Standing There Too,
Smoking Their Pipes Contemplatively.
But spite of all these people, in
spite, too, of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on
arrival there is ravishing.
A very fairyland - but a fairyland quite different from that of
Stamboul. For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre
above the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is
spread out simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert
and dominated by chaotic rocks. Thousands of minarets rise up on every
side like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can
see their innumerable slender points - but instead of being simply, as
at Stamboul, so many white spires, they are here complicated by
arabesques, by galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to
have borrowed the reddish colour of the desert.
The flat rocks tell of a region which formerly was without rain. The
innumerable palm-trees of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and
houses, sway their plumes in the wind, bewildered as it were by these
clouds laden with cold showers. In the south and in the west, at the
extreme limits of the view, as if upon the misty horizon of the
plains, appear two gigantic triangles. They are Gizeh and Memphis - the
eternal pyramids.
At the north of the town there is a corner of the desert quite
singular in its character - of the colour of bistre and of mummy - where
a whole colony of high cupolas, scattered at random, still stand
upright in the midst of sand and desolate rocks.
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