For in that alligator’s look
He read, as plain as in a book,
“Play on, or I will eat you yet,
With appetite the sharper set!”
Just as he thought he soon must faint
(And his emotions who can paint?)
He felt, and saw on looking round,
A curious trembling of the ground.
Thinks he, “This dancing crocodile
Is shaking up the land of Nile”—
He looked again, and saw, in places,
The pyramids leap from their bases!
As six or seven together rushed,
He cried, “Confound it! I am crushed!”
But, happy chance! a moment later
They fell and crushed the alligator.
Sing Cleopatra’s almond eye,
Sing reeds and hippopotami,
Sing tamarisk-trees by Mœris Lake,
And mud left in the sun to bake!
Then, as the fiddler wiped his brow,
Says he, “I feel exhausted now!”
Those ruins he no more regards
Than any fallen house of cards.
Out on the sands he chanced to find
A bit of temple to his mind,
And, as he sat down in the shade,
There came an Ethiop to his aid.
“De Hyksos,” said that nigger lad,
“Dis way some secret cellarage had;
Yah, massa, yah, de best ob wine;
De Shepherd Kings, dey know’d de Rhine.”
He quaffed those hocks, that fiddler bold,
Hocks five and thirty centuries old;
The cellar-man was older still—
Sing Typhon, Ptah, or what you will.
Sing Ra, sing Sos, sing Seb, sing Khem,
Sing Mycerinus, after them;
Sing Diodorus Siculus,
Who tells untruths, for all his fuss;
Sing Manetho; but keep this clue—
The tale which I have told is true.