. . .
Such A Night, In Such A Place, It Seems The /Last/ Night.
CHAPTER VII
THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO
Night. A long straight road, the artery of some capital, through which
our carriage drives at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the
pavement. Electric light everywhere. The shops are closing; it must
needs be late.
The road is Levantine in its general character; and we should have no
clear notion of the place did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage
signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. People pass dressed in
the long robe and tarboosh of the East; and some of the houses, above
the European shops, are ornamented with mushrabiyas. But this blinding
electricity strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite sure we
are in the East?
The road ends, opening on to darkness. Suddenly, without any warning,
it abuts upon a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we roll over a
yielding, felted soil, where all noise abruptly ceases - it is the
/desert/! . . . Not a vague, nondescript stretch of country such as in
the outskirts of our towns, not one of the solitudes of Europe, but
the threshold of the vast desolations of Arabia. /The desert/; and,
even if we had not known that it was awaiting us, we should have
recognised it by the indescribable quality of harshness and uniqueness
which, in spite of the darkness, cannot be mistaken.
But the night after all is not so black. It only seemed so, at the
first moment, by contrast with the glaring illumination of the street.
In reality it is transparent and blue. A half-moon, high up in the
heavens, and veiled by a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is
an Egyptian moon, more subtle than ours, it leaves to things a little
of their colour. We can see now, as well as feel, this desert, which
has opened and imposed its silence upon us. Before us is the paleness
of its sands and the reddish-brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no
country but Egypt are there such rapid surprises: to issue from a
street flanked by shops and stalls and, without transition, to find
this! . . .
Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed as the wheels of our
carriage sink into the sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers,
who presently assume the air of ghosts, with their long black or white
draperies, and noiseless tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the
sand and the moon.
But now almost at once, after the short intervening nothingness, we
find ourselves in a new town; streets with little low houses, little
cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on whitened sands,
beneath a white moon. . . . But there is no electricity in this town,
no lights, and nobody is stirring; doors and windows are shut: no
movement of any kind, and the silence, at first, is like that of the
surrounding desert. It is a town in which the half-light of the moon,
amongst so much vague whiteness, is diffused in such a way that it
seems to come from all sides at once and things cast no shadows which
might give them definiteness; a town where the soil is so yielding
that our progress is weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems
unreal; and, in penetrating farther into it, a sense of fear comes
over you that can neither be dismissed nor defined.
For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . And yet the houses, with
their windows barred like those of a harem, are in no way singular -
except that they are shut and silent. It is all this whiteness,
perhaps, which freezes us. And then, too, the silence is not, in fact,
like that of the desert, which did at least seem natural, inasmuch as
there was nothing there; here, on the contrary, there is a sense of
innumerable presences, which shrink away as you pass but nevertheless
continue to watch attentively. . . . We pass mosques in total darkness
and they too are silent and white, with a slight bluish tint cast on
them by the moon. And sometimes, between the houses, there are little
enclosed spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have no possible
verdure. And in these gardens numbers of little obelisks rise from the
sand - white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night we are in
the kingdom of absolute whiteness. What can they be, these strange
little gardens? . . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers the
streets with its thick coatings, continues to deaden the sound of our
progress, out of compliment no doubt to all these watchful things that
are so silent around us.
At the crossings and in the little squares the obelisks become more
numerous, erected always at either end of a slab of stone that is
about the length of a man. Their little motionless groups, posted as
if on the watch, seem so little real in their vague whiteness that we
feel tempted to verify them by touching, and, verily, we should not be
astonished if our hand passed through them as through a ghost. Farther
on there is a wide expanse without any houses at all, where these
ubiquitous little obelisks abound in the sand like ears of corn in a
field. There is now no further room for illusion. We are in a
cemetery, and have been passing in the midst of houses of the dead,
and mosques of the dead, in a town of the dead.
Once emerged from this cemetery, which in the end at least disclosed
itself in its true character, we are involved again in the
continuation of the mysterious town, which takes us back into its
network. Little houses follow one another as before, only now the
little gardens are replaced by little burial enclosures. And
everything grows more and more indistinct, in the gentle light, which
gradually grows less.
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