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.
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