In The Distance Herds Are Grazing In The
Cool Shade.
And we meet fellahs leading back from the field towards
the village on the river-bank their little donkeys, laden with sheaves
of corn.
The air is mild and wholesome under the high tufts of these
endless green plumes, which move in the warm wind almost without
noise. We seem to be in some happy land, where the pastoral life
should be easy, and even a little paradisiacal.
But beyond, in front of us, quite a different world is gradually
revealed. Its aspect assumes the importance of a menace from the
unknown; it awes us like an apparition of chaos, of universal death.
. . . It is the desert, the conquering desert, in the midst of which
inhabited Egypt, the green valleys of the Nile, trace merely a narrow
ribbon. And here, more than elsewhere, the sight of this sovereign
desert rising up before us is startling and thrilling, so high up it
seems, and we so low in the Edenlike valley shaded by the palms. With
its yellow hues, its livid marblings, and its sands which make it look
somehow as if it lacked consistency, it rises on the whole horizon
like a kind of soft wall or a great fearsome cloud - or rather, like a
long cataclysmic wave, which does not move indeed, but which, if it
did, would overwhelm and swallow everything. It is the /Memphite
desert/ - a place, that is to say, such as does not exist elsewhere on
earth; a fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, heaped up
for some three thousand years the embalmed bodies of their dead,
exaggerating, as time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs.
Now, above the sand which looks like the front of some great tidal
wave arrested in its progress, we see on all sides, and far into the
distance, triangles of superhuman proportions which were once the
tombs of mummies; pyramids, still upright, all of them, on their
sinister pedestal of sand. Some are comparatively near; others almost
lost in the background of the solitudes - and perhaps more awesome in
that they are merely outlined in grey, high up among the clouds.
*****
The little carriages that have brought us to the necropolis of
Memphis, through the interminable forest of palm-trees, had their
wheels fitted with large pattens for their journey over the sand.
Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome region, we commence to climb
a hill where all at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard;
the moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden silence around us,
as indeed is always the case when we reach these sands. It seems as if
it were a silence of respect which the desert itself imposes.
The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, until at last it
disappears, hidden by a line of sandhills - the first wave, as one
might say, of this waterless sea - and we are now mounted into the
kingdom of the dead, swept at this moment by a withering and almost
icy wind, which from below one would not have expected.
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