They Keep Us Now In Blinding
Whirlwinds, Which Swarm With Flies.
The "season" indeed is already
over, and the foreign invaders have fled until next autumn.
Egypt is
now more Egyptian, beneath a more burning sky. The sun of this Easter
Sunday is as hot as ours of July, and the ground seems as if it would
perish of drought. But it is always thus in the springtime of this
rainless country; the trees, which have kept their leaves throughout
the winter, shed them in April as ours do in November. There is no
shade anywhere and everything suffers. Everything grows yellow on the
yellow sands. But there is no cause for uneasiness: the inundation is
at hand, which has never failed since the commencement of our
geological period. In another few weeks the prodigious river will
spread along its banks, just as in the times of the God Amen, a
precocious and impetuous life. And meanwhile the orange-trees, the
jasmine and the honeysuckle, which men have taken care to water with
water from the Nile, are full of riotous bloom. As we pass the gardens
of Old Cairo, which alternate with the tumbling houses, this continual
cloud of white dust that envelops us comes suddenly laden with their
sweet fragrance; so that, despite the drought and the bareness of the
trees, the scents of a sudden and feverish springtime are already in
the air.
When we arrive at the walls of what used to be the Roman citadel we
have to descend from our carriage, and passing through a low doorway
penetrate on foot into the labyrinth of a Coptic quarter which is
dying of dust and old age.
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