Thompson, Joseph P.: Photographic views of Egypt, past and present (Boston, 1854)

DAY AND NIGIIT.

87

How brilliant the sunrise of eacli "morning without
clouds." Light is everywhere. It suffuses nature with its
glow. There are no contrasts of color, for there are no
clouds or mists through which the " law of refraction" can
make colors. There are but two colors in the morning sky
of Egypt: — the bright golden sun — not the dull yellow
metal, but the lustrous gold, fresh from the die; and the
liquid blue, in whose unfathomable depths it floats dreamily
along. Floats dreamily — for, though there is no cloud or
mist, there is a drapery of light, that reveals the sun as
through a gauze of faintest saffron. This is the phenome-
non of sunshine in "the east; you do not seem to see the
sun, but sun-light everywhere : —

"Bright ejjluence of bright essence incrcatc."

How gorgeous the sunset of each evening, when the
vapors drawn from the river gather about the Lybian
mountains, as beautiful transparencies of dissolving tints,
while the morning robe of saffron droops down from the
sky upon the river and the Arabian chain ! The Nile sunset
perpetually varies. For more than sixty days in succession
I have looked upon it, without detecting a resemblance in
ar>y of its features from day to day, save in that exquisite
zodiacal light that lingers in plaintive beauty when the sun
is gone.

There is no " corporation moonlight" on the Kile; no
moonlight in the almanac that is not in the sky, and when
the city fathers leave the streets to mist and dingy dark,
because if there is no moon there "ought to be." In Egypt
the moon of the almanac is always in the sky.

" Day to day doth pour out speech;
Kight to night doth show forth knowledge."

Or, as the old Psalter has it, "One night certificih