At such times the light is considered favourable, and
they rank among the curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of
tourists (who persist in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake
themselves thither of an evening - a noisy caravan mounted on little
donkeys. But to-night the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall
no doubt be alone in troubling them in their ghostly communion.
To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most
massive objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But
nevertheless it shows their detail and leaves them something of their
daylight colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the
ruins of the mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved
their reddish or brown colours, although the sand which separates
them, and makes between the tombs of the different sultans little dead
solitudes, remains pale and wan.
And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding always without noise, traces on
this same sand little furrows which the wind will have effaced by
to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
useless as they are impossible to make. You may pass here where you
like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
beings. The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a
moon of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.
Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from a
distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with
denticulated trefoils of exquisite fashioning.
But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mameluke oppressors, or keeps
them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers
to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety
contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the
mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles
them. And all around are the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us
irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches are outlined to-night
in shadow against the mother-of-pearl light of the sky, and debris of
sculptured stones are strewn about.
