| Fifteen pyramids | Distant |
| One palm-tree | Distant |
| Several ill-smelling streams | Quite close |
| Flat sandy desert | Near and distant |
| A perfectly bare range of low hills beginning half a mile away and reaching to Arabia. | |
An English advertisement of foreign appearance bore witness to these charms and ended with a striking appeal to leave for desert air “the filthy, stinking city,” as it characterized Grand Cairo.
We responded to the appeal, and went to stay in a hotel of large corridors and wide balconies which looked out upon the fifteen pyramids. Opposite was a small, bare house called Villa Mon Bijou. The town was planted on a desert so flat that it seemed a German toy town set upon a table; only there were no trees with curly green foliage to be seen, because no one might plant a living thing unless by order from Government.[2] Neat little pavements with new little gas lamps traversed it rectangularly, and came every way to an abrupt stop in heavy desert sand. There was a tiny English church, in which the few English Christians staying in the place assembled. Little flat-roofed villas like coloured cardboard boxes stood back from the pavement with strange ornaments above the gate; here a stone eagle with knees turned outwards, there a stuffed fox. Backwards and forwards we went under noontide sun to the baths, and were told to rest in the Khedive’s sitting-room, upholstered with yellow satin.
One would have thought that nothing so brand-new could have been found in sight of the pyramid of Unas and the cemetery of Sakkara. Even death seemed glaringly recent. One day we drove in the desert and searched the horizon for objects of interest. “What is that?” we said, pointing to a small building on the outskirts of the town. “That,” replied Saïd with pride, “is the new slaughter-house.” “And this enclosure?” “The English cemetery.” “And that yonder?” “The Italian mortuary.” “What is that which looks like a village on the hill?” “That is the Mahommedan burying-place.” “And that beyond?” “Another graveyard.” Then he drove us through a valley of Hinnom, where we marked, among other things, a dead camel and a dead calf; and as we passed between the windmill and the ill-smelling stream we saw three coffins lie, brand-new, unguarded and alone.
But towards evening a certain magic fell upon the place. We had gone one day towards the single palm-tree in the desert. Miles and miles of sand and air, unstirred by any slightest sound, seemed to lie between us and that solitary tree, and when we reached it nothing could be seen but the slot of beasts around it.
Then as we turned the light began to change. Behind the fifteen pyramids the sky glowed scarlet till it tinged the water of the Nile with blood. Far up in the blue hung an ethereal arc of crimson light; the heaven deepened to indigo where it met night; kindled into indescribable sapphire where it touched the dying day; the conflagration grew till at last earth glowed its answer to the sky with a purple flood rising and deluging sand-hills and valley.
As we neared the toy town with its twinkling lights the glow had died away, and there gloomed before us dimly a knoll round which knelt the camels of the Bedawîn; the figures which moved beside them with dark, fine profile and the white cloths round their heads seemed like Magi come to greet the Royal Child.
Again we went up the hills which, like a low rampart, bordered the plain to the east. At the foot they were carved into quarries of a stone so white that it seemed like wedges cut in a great cream cheese. The hills were barren, but for a few straggling plants and grasses about; like a raised map or the skeleton of the world. Yet as we went on we still found always in front, like the marks on the carriage drive, a curving, trodden road, winding up vanishing out of sight.
While we stood looking at the loneliness there came daintily stepping, with embroidered shoes and black silk mantles round them, a party of women to meet us; in front a man carried a child. I cannot but think that they vanished into thin air when they had passed us.
Or again one might descend towards the river, on the road between the fields. There as the sky lights its fires towards evening the men would leave their work and stand with dripping feet on their coarse outer garment by the water’s edge to say the evening prayer. Near the town stood a sycamore, under which, on a raised platform, some men prayed loud and lustily five times a day. “God likit them very much,” said the donkey-boy; but with cynical estimation of the importance of this fact he added, “If I bray, where is my business?”