Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance, to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt? The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs,

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx—a bird like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin where perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird flew near the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying now low, now high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it, which held it, from w

It was the “Little Christmas” of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara, after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached the top was an “American gentlemens” called Mark Twain, on his first visit to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad foot, and declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid. He had been up and

Through a long and golden noontide, and on into an afternoon whose opulence of warmth and light it seemed could never wane, I sat alone, or wandered gently quite alone, in the Temple of Seti I. at Abydos. Here again I was in a place of the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the dead in the sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But here in Abydos I was accompanied by whiteness. The general effect of Seti’s mighty temple is that it is a white temple when seen in full sunshine and beneath a sk

I do not find in Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and at first almost bewildered me. Stranger by far is Morocco, stranger the country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El Kantara. There I feel very far away, as a child feels distance from dear, familiar things. I look to the horizon expectant of I know not what magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of the summons to advance to marvellous lands, where marvellous things must happen. I am taken by that

From Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, Judge of the Dead, I came to Denderah, the great temple of the “Lady of the Underworld,” as the goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she was usually worshipped as the Egyptian Aphrodite, goddess of joy, goddess of love and loveliness. It was early morning when I went ashore. The sun was above the eastern hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of plaited grass, sent me half shyly the greeting, “May your day be happy!” Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of

Buildings have personalities. Some fascinate as beautiful women fascinate; some charm as a child may charm, naively, simply, but irresistibly. Some, like conquerors, men of blood and iron, without bowels of mercy, pitiless and determined, strike awe to the soul, mingled with the almost gasping admiration that power wakes in man. Some bring a sense of heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like certain temples of the Greeks, by their immense dignity, speak to the nature almost as music speaks, and ch

Upon the wall of the great court of Amenhotep III. in the temple of Luxor there is a delicious dancing procession in honor of Rameses II. It is very funny and very happy; full of the joy of life—a sort of radiant cake-walk of old Egyptian days. How supple are these dancers! They seem to have no bones. One after another they come in line upon the mighty wall, and each one bends backward to the knees of the one who follows. As I stood and looked at them for the first time, almost I heard the twitt

Nevertheless, sometimes one likes to escape from the thing one loves, and there are hours when the gay voices of Luxor fatigue the ears, when one desires a great calm. Then there are silent voices that summon one across the river, when the dawn is breaking over the hills of the Arabian desert, or when the sun is declining toward the Libyan mountains—voices issuing from lips of stone, from the twilight of sanctuaries, from the depths of rock-hewn tombs. The peace of the plain of Thebes in the ear

At the entrance to the temple of Medinet-Abu, near the small groups of palms and the few brown houses, often have I turned and looked back across the plain before entering through the first beautiful doorway, to see the patient backs and right sides of the Colossi, the far-off, dreamy mountains beyond Karnak and the Nile. And again, when I have entered and walked a little distance, I have looked back at the almost magical picture framed in the doorway; at the bottom of the picture a layer of bro

“This, my lord, is the thinking-place of Rameses the Great.” So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one morning—Ibrahim, who is almost as prolific in the abrupt creation of peers as if he were a democratic government. I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with columns, architraves covered with inscriptions, segments of flat roof. Here and there traces of painting, dull-red, pale, ethereal blue—the “love-color” of Egypt, as the Egyptians often call it—still adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified,

Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity;

On the way to the tombs of the kings I went to the temple of Kurna, that lonely cenotaph, with its sand-colored massive façade, its heaps of fallen stone, its wide and ruined doorway, its thick, almost rough, columns recalling Medinet-Abu. There is not very much to see, but from there one has a fine view of other temples—of the Ramesseum, looking superb, like a grand skeleton; of Medinet-Abu, distant, very pale gold in the morning sunlight; of little Deir-al-Medinet, the pretty child of the Ptol

Prayer pervades the East. Far off across the sands, when one is traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising toward the sky. A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to Allah. And where there are no minarets—in the great wastes of the dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken even by any lonely, wandering bird—the camels are stopped at the appointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are laid down, the brown pilgrims prostrate t

Some people talk of the “sameness” of the Nile; and there is a lovely sameness of golden light, of delicious air, of people, and of scenery. For Egypt is, after all, mainly a great river with strips on each side of cultivated land, flat, green, not very varied. River, green plains, yellow plains, pink, brown, steel-grey, or pale-yellow mountains, wail of shadoof, wail of sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort of golden monotony, in this land pervaded with light and pervaded with soun

As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of “the great Enchantress,” or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, “the Lady of Philae,” the land began to change in character, to be full of a new and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to northern Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are wilder looking, and much wilder seeming than Egypt. Now, as I approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense Africa that I had known

“Pharaoh’s Bed,” which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can “carry off,” as it were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so much a spell wov

By Old Cairo I do not mean only le vieux Caire of the guide-book, the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic church of Abu Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are said to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury of King Herod; but the Cairo that is not new, that is not dedicated wholly to officialdom and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and the advance of civilisation—civilisation that does so much harm as well as so much good