If In Cairo There Are
Melancholy, And Silence, And Antiquity, In Cairo May Be Found Also
Places Of Intense Animation, Of Almost Frantic Bustle, Of Uproar That
Cries To Heaven.
To Bulak still come the high-prowed boats of the
Nile, with striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their
merchandise.
From the Delta they bring thousands of panniers of fruit,
and from Upper Egypt and from Nubia all manner of strange and precious
things which are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are
sold to many a traveller at prices which, to put it mildly, bring to
the sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one leave his heart, he
leaves also not seldom his skin. The goblin men of the great goblin
market of Cairo take all, and remain unsatisfied and calling for more.
I said, in a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell
upon my ears. But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten
certain bazaars of Cairo.
But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The
golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their
blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with
their tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking
down on the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the
Pyramids with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits
somewhere near the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the
enigma of human life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the
temples; the great desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.
Egypt calls - even across the space of the world; and across the space
of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its
summons, because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of
sand, and ruins, and gold"; the land of the charmed serpent, the land
of the afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains
of Libya, but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it
from the base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon;
the land that has a spell - wonderful, beautiful Egypt.
End of The Spell of Egypt, by Robert Hichens
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