He
Then Asked Us What We Had Called The Mughreebee Whom We Had Described
To Him:
We replied, a magician; and he and the janissary repeated
the word over many times, in order to make themselves thoroughly
acquainted with it.
In all cases, they were delighted with the
acquisition of a new word, and were very thankful to me when I
corrected their pronunciation. Thus, when the janissary showed me what
he called kundergo, growing in the fields, and explained that it
made a blue dye, and I told him that we called it indigo, he never
rested until he had learned the word, which he repeated to Mohammed
and Mohammed to him. I never met with two more intelligent men in
their rank of life, or persons who would do greater credit to their
teachers; and brief as has been my intercourse with the Egyptians, I
feel persuaded, that a good method of imparting knowledge is all that
is wanting to raise them in the scale of nations.
During our progress up the river, I had been schooling myself,
and endeavouring to keep down my expectations, lest I should be
disappointed at the sight of the Pyramids. We were told that we should
see them at the distance of five-and-thirty miles; and when informed
that they were in view, my heart beat audibly as I threw open the
cabin door, and beheld them gleaming in the sun, pure and bright
as the silvery clouds above them. Far from being disappointed, the
vastness of their dimensions struck me at once, as they rose in
lonely majesty on the bare plain, with nothing to detract from their
grandeur, or to afford, by its littleness, a point of comparison.
We were never tired of gazing upon these noble monuments of an age
shrouded in impenetrable mystery.
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