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.
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