known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the Sahara
spaces. But here I was not confronted with an immensity of nature, but
with a gleaming river and an immensity of man. Beneath me was the native
village, in the heart of daylight dusty and unkempt, but now becoming
charged with velvety beauty, with the soft and heavy mystery that at
evening is born among great palm-trees. Along the path that led from
it, coming toward the avenue of sphinxes with ram's-heads that watch for
ever before the temple door, a great white camel stepped, its rider a
tiny child with a close, white cap upon his head. The child was singing
to the glory of the sunset, or was it to the glory of Amun, "the hidden
one," once the local god of Thebes, to whom the grandest temple in
the world was dedicated? I listen to the childish, quavering voice,
twittering almost like a bird, and one word alone came up to me--the
word one hears in Egypt from all the lips that speak and sing: from the
Nubians round their fires at night, from the little boatmen of the lower
reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins of the desert, and the donkey
boys of the villages, from the sheikh who reads one's future in water
spilt on a plate, and the Bisharin with buttered curls who runs to sell
one beads from his tent among the sand-dunes.

"Allah!" the child was singing as he passed upon his way.

Pigeons circled above their pretty towers. The bats came out, as if they
knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal lemon
color, the orange and the red. The little obelisk beyond the last
sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change at
sunset--pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel, sycamore,
and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious
finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile began to gleam. Upon
its steel and silver torches of amber flame were lighted. The Libyan