The archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the first,
as much as their isolation in such a place.
They look like bells, or
gigantic dervish hats placed on pedestals, and those farthest away
give the impression of squat, large-headed figures posted there as
sentinels, watching the vague horizon of Arabia beyond.
They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
where the Mameluke Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three
hundred years, sleep now in complete abandonment. Nowadays, it is
true, some visits are beginning to be paid to them - on winter nights
when the moon is full and they throw on the sands their great clear-
cut shadows. At such times the light is considered favourable, and
they rank among the curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of
tourists (who persist in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake
themselves thither of an evening - a noisy caravan mounted on little
donkeys. But to-night the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall
no doubt be alone in troubling them in their ghostly communion.
To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most
massive objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But
nevertheless it shows their detail and leaves them something of their
daylight colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the
ruins of the mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved
their reddish or brown colours, although the sand which separates
them, and makes between the tombs of the different sultans little dead
solitudes, remains pale and wan.
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