“Upon my word it is a great temptation to join you,” said Miss Dawkins, “only for that horrid Englishman.”
“Vat, Mr. Stanley?”
“Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to Mr. Stanley. The horridness I speak of does not attach to him personally, but to his stiff, respectable, ungainly, well-behaved, irrational, and uncivilised country. You see I am not very patriotic.”
“Not quite so moch as my friend, Mr. Damer.”
“Ha! ha! ha! an excellent creature, isn’t he? And so they all are, dear creatures. But then they are so backward. They are most anxious that I should join them up the Nile, but——,” and then Miss Dawkins shrugged her shoulders gracefully, and, as she flattered herself, like a Frenchwoman. After that they rode on in silence for a few moments.
“Yes, I must see Mount Sinai,” said Miss Dawkins, and then sighed deeply. M. Delabordeau, notwithstanding that his country does stand at the head of all human civilisation, was not courteous enough to declare that if Miss Dawkins would join his party across the desert, nothing would be wanting to make his beatitude in this world perfect.
Their road from the village of the chicken-hatching ovens lay up along the left bank of the Nile, through an immense grove of lofty palm-trees, looking out from among which our visitors could ever and anon see the heads of the two great Pyramids;—that is, such of them could see it as felt any solicitude in the matter.
It is astonishing how such things lose their great charm as men find themselves in their close neighbourhood. To one living in New York or London, how ecstatic is the interest inspired by these huge structures. One feels that no price would be too high to pay for seeing them as long as time and distance, and the world’s inexorable task-work, forbid such a visit. How intense would be the delight of climbing over the wondrous handiwork of those wondrous architects so long since dead; how thrilling the awe with which one would penetrate down into their interior caves—those caves in which lay buried the bones of ancient kings, whose very names seem to have come to us almost from another world!
But all these feelings become strangely dim, their acute edges wonderfully worn, as the subjects which inspired them are brought near to us. “Ah! so those are the Pyramids, are they?” says the traveller, when the first glimpse of them is shown to him from the window of a railway carriage. “Dear me; they don’t look so very high, do they? For Heaven’s sake put the blind down, or we shall be destroyed by the dust.” And then the ecstasy and keen delight of the Pyramids has vanished for ever.
Our friends, therefore, who for weeks past had seen from a distance, though they had not yet visited them, did not seem to have any strong feeling on the subject as they trotted through the grove of palm-trees. Mr. Damer had not yet escaped from his wife, who was still fretful from the result of her little accident.