“The first to dare—” said the boy, feeling his pulse quickening; “yes, that does make it great.”
“To me, that is the spell of Egypt,” continued the scientist. “Everywhere, in this old land, one has a feeling of a world which dates back so long ago that to the dwellers of that time, the simplest things were a reckless adventure. They blazed the trail for civilization, those ancient Egyptians, and the thrill of the Valley of the Nile lies in the fact that one can see those blaze-marks still.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. Not only in the temples and the pyramids, but in the people themselves. It is a haunted land, Perry, haunted by Pharaohs as other lands are haunted by fairies, and the spell always holds fast. I have been here before, and still I am almost as eager as you can be to step ashore in Egypt once again.”
“It’s all so new to me,” the boy said, hungrily.
“It won’t seem new,” his uncle rejoined. “Once you have known the call of Egypt, you will feel as though you were returning to a long-forgotten home. You will see. But you will not feel it in Alexandria. You must wait.”
The warning not to expect too much of Alexandria came in time to save Perry from a grievous disappointment, for, as he confided to Antoine, a few hours later, during all the yelling bustle of docking and customs examination, commercial Alexandria was not an Egyptian city at all.
“It’s like Genoa,” the boy remarked, half-indignantly, recalling that busy port at which the steamer had stopped for a few hours on the way down the Mediterranean, “and I haven’t heard a word of anything but Italian since we landed!”
His tone implied that he was being cheated, and his friend laughed.
“Yes, yes, Alexandria isn’t Egyptian,” he said. “It wasn’t built until long after Egypt’s glory had decayed. The time of Alexandria’s greatness was when she was a Roman colony, and Rome is Italy.”