CHAPTER XXV
MAROONED
Had any human fly ever buzzed himself so fatally into the spider-webs of other people's love affairs? I asked myself sternly. As soon as Providence plucked me out of one web, back I would bumble into another, though I had no time for a love affair of my own.
When the Enchantress Isis had slipped past many miles of desert shore, black-striped and tawny as a leopard's skin, and other desert shores so fiercely yellow as to create an effect of sunshine under gray skies, we arrived at Assuan. I had not yet kept my promise to Rachel, though whether from lack of opportunity or courage I was not sure.
Here we were at historic Assuan; and nothing had happened, nothing which could be written down in black and white, since the excitements at Luxor. Nevertheless, some of us were different within, and the differences were due, directly or indirectly, to those excitements.
Now we were nearing Ethiopia, alias the Land of Cush, though Monny said she could not bear to have it called by that name, except, of course, in the Bible, where it couldn't be helped. How would any of us like to "register" at an hotel as Mr. or Miss So-and-So, of Cush? Oshkosh sounded more romantic.
No land, however, could look more romantic than Assuan, City of the Cataracts, Greek Syene, that granite quarry whose red syenite made obelisks and sarcophagi for kings of countless dynasties. "Suan," as the Copts renamed it (a frontier town of Egypt since the days of Ezekiel the prophet), now appeared a gay place, made for pleasure-pilgrims.
Sky and river were dazzling blue, and the sea of sand was a sea of gold, the dark rocks lying like tamed monsters at the feet of Khnum, god of the Cataract, glittered bright as jet, over which a libation of red wine had gushed. The river-front of the town, with its hotels and shops, was brightly coloured as a row of shining shells from a southern sea; tints of pink and blue and amber, translucently clear in contrast with the dark green of lebbek trees and palms, in whose shadow flowers burned, like rainbow-tinted flames of driftwood. Between our eyes and the brilliant picture, a network of thin dark lines was tangled, as if an artist had defaced his canvas with scratches of a drying brush. These scratches were in reality the masts of moored feluccas, bristling close to the shore like a high hedge of flower stems, stripped of blossoms and bent by driving wind.
On the opposite side of the river, the desert crouched like a lion who flings back his head with a shake of yellow mane, before he stoops to drink. And in the midst of the stream rose Elephantine Island, with its crown of feathery palms, its breastwork of Roman ruins (a medal of fame for the kings it gave to Egypt) and its undying lullaby sung by the cataract, among surrounding rocks.
Very strange rocks they were, black as wet onyx, though for thousands of years they had been painted rose by sunrise and sunset; shapes of animal gods, shapes of negro slaves, shapes of broken obelisks and fallen temples; shapes of elephants like those seen first by Egyptians on this island; shapes which one felt could never have taken form except in Egypt.