The Spell of Egypt by Robert Hichens — Read

By Old Cairo I do not mean only _le vieux Caire_ of the guide-book, / the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic church of Abu / Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are said to / have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury of / King Herod; but the Cairo that is not new, that is not dedicated wholly / to officialdom and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and the / advance of civilisation -- civilisation that does so much harm as well / as so much good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces beauty / with the other -- preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial turmult; / that stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the Western / man, even in the midst of what seems, perhaps, like intimacy; Eastern / to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the vulgarities, the / brilliant ineptitudes of the West beat about it like waves about some / unyielding wall of the sea.

When I went back to Egypt, after a lapse of many years, I fled at once / from Cairo, and upon the long reaches of the Nile, in the great spaces / of the Libyan Desert, in the luxuriant palm-grooves of the Fayyum, / among the tamarisk-bushes and on the pale waters of Kurun, I forgot the / changes which, in my brief glimpse of the city and its environs, had / moved me to despondency. But one cannot live in the solitudes for ever. / And at last from Madi-nat-al-Fayyum, with the first pilgrims starting / for Mecca, I returned to the great city, determined to seek in it once / more for the fascinations it used to hold, and perhaps still held in the / hidden ways where modern feet, nearly always in a hurry, had seldom time / to penetrate.