Egypt and its Monuments by Robert Hichens

As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of "the great Enchantress," or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, "the Lady of Phile," the land began to change in character, to be full of a new and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to northern Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are wilder-looking, and much wilder-seeming, than Egypt. Now, as I approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Näil, crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the traveling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love creeping down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them that wonderful air which belongs only to them -- the air that dwells among the dunes in the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of Liberty upon the face of a man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as lithe, tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets flames in the eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind to the Sloughi. The true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, as I saw to right and left amber curves and sheeny recesses, shining ridges and bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds make upon them? It is an enchanted _royaume_ of the sands through which one approaches Isis.

Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Phile, and they have given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute, -- it cost about a million and a half pounds, -- and no doubt she ought to be gratified.