We Seem To Be Walking In Some Valley Of The
Apocalypse With Flaming Walls.
Silence and death, beneath a
transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful
apotheosis - it was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose
for their necropoles.
The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and at
the end of this "Valley of the Kings," under the sun now nearly
meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we
expected to come upon a dread silence. But what is this?
At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking
recess, what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean? Is
it a meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand
some fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion. In a corner an
electrical workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black
smoke, and all about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming
and going, making a great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content,
are a number of Cook's tourists of both sexes, and some even who
verily seem to have no sex at all. They are come for the royal
audience; some on asses, some in jaunting cars, and some, the stout
ladies who are grown short of wind, in chairs carried by the Bedouins.
From the four points of Europe they have assembled in this desert
ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at the bottom of a hole.
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