DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.11448#0166
THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS
[chap xx-
the impressions I intended to convey in the words of the most
agreeable and perhaps instructive, of Egyptian travellers.
" I have realized Horace's idea of complete repose in lying
at length under a green arbutus, beside his own bright fountain
at Lucretilis ; but what is that to reclining under a tent, on a
Turkish divan, in an Arab boat ascending the Nile, a never-
ending diorama of loveliness!—villages, dovecots, mosques,
santons' tombs, hermits' cells, temples, pyramids, avenues of
the thorny acacia, and loveliest of all, groves after groves of
date-trees,
" 'bending
Languidly their leaf-crowned heads,
Like youthful maids, when sleep descending
Warns them to their silken beds,'
all slumbrous, all gliding past like the scenery of a dream, with-
out effort, peacefully, silently ; and yet, as when watching the
stars at midnight, you feel all the while as if the sweetest music
was murmuring in your ear." *
Such are the scenes among which we live, all dissimilar from
those of Europe ; and the incidents of our life are no less unlike.
Sometimes, it is true, for days together, the north wind fills our
sails, and then, of course, we never leave the boat, and are
driven to our own resources, the chief of which is reading.
The mental activity, and the physical repose, that such an exist-
ence superinduces, would make a school-boy studious. Herodo-
tus, who announces, and Belzoni, who discovers, the Egyptian
mysteries, are our favorite authors. The former, with his vivid
perceptions and simple, yet most graphic, descriptions might have
written yesterday, for the Past, of Egypt is as its Present.
One reads also with the advantage of copious illustrations;
now the traveller is bending over the pages that teem with mar-
vels, now he looks up, beholding them realized, and the incredible
rendered credible. Even now we have lost sight of the Pyra-
mids, whose existence the ear never would have credited if the
eye had not seen them. Now we are passing Ekmim, where a
* Lord Lindsay
[chap xx-
the impressions I intended to convey in the words of the most
agreeable and perhaps instructive, of Egyptian travellers.
" I have realized Horace's idea of complete repose in lying
at length under a green arbutus, beside his own bright fountain
at Lucretilis ; but what is that to reclining under a tent, on a
Turkish divan, in an Arab boat ascending the Nile, a never-
ending diorama of loveliness!—villages, dovecots, mosques,
santons' tombs, hermits' cells, temples, pyramids, avenues of
the thorny acacia, and loveliest of all, groves after groves of
date-trees,
" 'bending
Languidly their leaf-crowned heads,
Like youthful maids, when sleep descending
Warns them to their silken beds,'
all slumbrous, all gliding past like the scenery of a dream, with-
out effort, peacefully, silently ; and yet, as when watching the
stars at midnight, you feel all the while as if the sweetest music
was murmuring in your ear." *
Such are the scenes among which we live, all dissimilar from
those of Europe ; and the incidents of our life are no less unlike.
Sometimes, it is true, for days together, the north wind fills our
sails, and then, of course, we never leave the boat, and are
driven to our own resources, the chief of which is reading.
The mental activity, and the physical repose, that such an exist-
ence superinduces, would make a school-boy studious. Herodo-
tus, who announces, and Belzoni, who discovers, the Egyptian
mysteries, are our favorite authors. The former, with his vivid
perceptions and simple, yet most graphic, descriptions might have
written yesterday, for the Past, of Egypt is as its Present.
One reads also with the advantage of copious illustrations;
now the traveller is bending over the pages that teem with mar-
vels, now he looks up, beholding them realized, and the incredible
rendered credible. Even now we have lost sight of the Pyra-
mids, whose existence the ear never would have credited if the
eye had not seen them. Now we are passing Ekmim, where a
* Lord Lindsay