in the other.  I heard Scottish soldiers playing, “I’ll be in Scotland before ye!” and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed to founder and collapse—­but only for a moment.  It was after four in the afternoon.  Soon day would be declining.  And I seemed to remember that the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago—­moved me as few, rare things have ever done.  Within half an hour I was alone, far up the long road—­Ismail’s road—­that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the Pyramids.  And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured me.

It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a tideless sea—­a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses in their feathery embrace.  Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.  In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously reappearing among their narrow trunks.  Here and there a living thing moved slowly, wading homeward through this sea:  a camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo, two donkeys, followed by boys who held with brown hands their dark blue skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his quickly stepping horse.  At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons of Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm.  Then the palm-trees in the water, and growing to its edge, the pale sands that, far as the eyes could see, from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward the west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise where men grow drowsy in well-being, and dream away the years.  And then I looked farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw a Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built.  As a golden wonder it saluted me after all my years of absence.  Later I was to see it grey as grey sands, sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars at night, white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the sand-dunes between it and Sakkara.  But as a golden thing it greeted me, as a golden miracle I shall remember it.

Slowly the sun went down.  The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.  Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden sands beneath the golden sky.  And now the gold came traveling down from the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the wine of gold that flowed down Midas’s throat; then, as the magic grew, to a Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden ice, hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave.  The islands rising from this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the palms and their shadows that fell upon the marvel black.