Hundreds of little birds sing to us distractedly of the
joy of life; the sun shines radiantly, magnificently; the impetuous
corn is already in the ear; it might be some gay pageant of our days
of May. One forgets that it is February, that we are still in the
winter - the luminous winter of Egypt.
Here and there amongst the outspread fields are villages buried under
the thick foliage of trees - under acacias which, in the distance,
resemble ours at home; beyond indeed the mountain chain of Libya, like
a wall confining the fertile fields, looks strange perhaps in its
rose-colour, and too desolate; but, nevertheless amidst this glad
music of the fields, these songs of larks and twitterings of sparrows,
you scarcely realise that you are in a foreign land.
Abydos! What magic there is in the name! "Abydos is at hand, and in
another moment we shall be there." The mere words seem somehow to
transform the aspect of the homely green fields, and make this
pastoral region almost imposing. The buzzing of the flies increases in
the overheated air and the song of the birds subsides until at last it
dies away in the approach of noon.
We have been journeying a little more than an hour amongst the verdure
of the growing corn that lies upon the fields like a carpet, when
suddenly, beyond the little houses and tress of a village, quite a
different world is disclosed - the familiar world of glare and death
which presses so closely upon inhabited Egypt: the desert! The desert
of Libya, and now as ever when we come upon it suddenly from the banks
of the old river it rises up before us; beginning at once, without
transition, absolute and terrible, as soon as we leave the thick
velvet of the last field, the cool shade of the last acacia. Its sands
seem to slope towards us, in a prodigious incline, from the strange
mountains that we saw from the happy plain, and which now appear,
enthroned beyond, like the monarchs of all this nothingness.
The town of Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose
once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the
solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of
Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the
marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless
waves and preserved them almost intact up till the present day.
The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its shifting soil, which
smothers the sound of our steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to
change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if great fires had been
lighted in the neighbourhood.
