And Meanwhile Our Carriage, Proceeding Always Without Noise, Traces On
This Same Sand Little Furrows Which The Wind Will Have Effaced By
To-Morrow.
There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
useless as they are impossible to make.
You may pass here where you
like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
beings. The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a
moon of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.
Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from a
distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with
denticulated trefoils of exquisite fashioning.
But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mameluke oppressors, or keeps
them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers
to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety
contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the
mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles
them.
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