suggests to the traveller approaches to the sea, so that beyond each
pallid dune, as he draws near it, he half expects to hear the lapping of
the waves. Presently, when, having ascended that marvellous staircase
of the New Year, walking in procession with the priests upon its walls
toward the rays of Ra, I came out upon the temple roof, and looked upon
the desert--upon sheeny sands, almost like slopes of satin shining
in the sun, upon paler sands in the distance, holding an Arab _campo
santo_, in which rose the little creamy cupolas of a sheikh's tomb,
surrounded by a creamy wall, those little cupolas gave to me a feeling
of the real, the irresistible Africa such as I had not known since I had
been in Egypt; and I thought I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum
of praying and praising voices.

"God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens through which flow
rivulets. They shall be for ever therein, and that is the reward of the
virtuous."

The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I approached the temple
deepened when I drew close to it, when I stood within it. In the first
hall, mighty, magnificent, full of enormous columns from which faces of
Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, I found only one
face almost complete, saved from the fury of fanatics by the protection
of the goddess of chance, in whom the modern Egyptian so implicitly
believes. In shape it was a delicate oval. In the long eyes, about the
brow, the cheeks, there was a strained expression that suggested to me
more than a gravity--almost an anguish--of spirit. As I looked at it, I
thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this the ideal of joy in the time of the
Ptolemies? Joy may be rapturous, or it may be serene; but could it ever
be like this? The pale, delicious blue that here and there, in tiny
sections, broke the almost haggard, greyish whiteness of this first hall