SHADOW OF THE PYRAMIDS

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2341, 24 December 1914, Page 6

SHADOW OF THE PYRAMIDS

WHERE NEW ZEALANDERS ARE CAMPED A GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION The following fino description of Cairo,- where tho New Zealand and Australian Expeditionary Force is encamped, and of Mena House, where the officers' mess is held, is by Theodore Flatau in the novel "The Thrice Born": Cairo lay beneath a flat-roofed conglomeration with Jittlo colour save of mud-brick and whitewash; with little Unovenness except where the crescent tipped minarets and bulkier spires gleamed or glowed in the rosy evening, or where tho green of acacia and palm showed in a strangely soft and luxuriant contrast. In the distance, to the right, the city ended and gave way to the Delta fields; behind them and below them lay the yellow white of the Mokattam Hill quarries with the great grey gaps and black holes whence King Cheops's slaves hewed stone for his pyramid, two thousand years before the Delta ended, and only a narrow green ribbon of it cut the yellowbrown, the desert stretched with dim hollow and soft swelling to whore the pyramids of Sakhara raised their hazy bulks. Before the eye and far beyond the city, the Gizeh Pyramids loomed sharp and black, silhouetted against the blaze of the setting sun. And through it all ran the shining strip of Nile water—the essence, tho soul, the origin of Egyptian life and being. And over it all and in it all was the hazy light of the sun—the scavenger, the fertiliser, the unworshipped God oi Egypt. A few distant noises floated smoothly up from out the city's murmuring and were swallowed in the maw of silence. The shrill tones of a woman upon the flat roof of a mud dwelling, scolding a child; a rooster upon a like low eminence mistakenly greeting the setting sun; the bray of an ass, the echo of a tram gong; the drone of a double-reed-ed flute. . . . The ball of fire dropped below tho desert edge, and, as though in a death struggle, flung a thousand flaming arms into tho blue. .A puff of white smoke burst from the Citadel barracks beneath them, and the thunder of the sunset gun reverberated, roared, rolled, and swept away into echo, into nothing: The warm haze became cold mist; pink turned to grey; a cool breeze danced out of the desert—the first sigh of night. From a dozen- minarets the mueddin wailed and quavered tho cry of God, the one God.

Of all the great hotels in Egypt Mena House, with one foot in the green of its garden and the cultivated fields, and the other embedded in the sand of the desert, is most unlike a great hotel. It does not reek of paint and varnishes; it has no bold front of ten stories, no gold gaudiness or bomarbled ostentation. But, as someone said, "it is all woodeny .and comf."

. It is low and flat and great, stretching from the straight Pyramids • road, with its marshalled rows of trees upraised from the surrounding flatness, to the very, edge of the desert solitude, so close, so near that Abdul and Zaki and Ali and the rost of them sweep the creeping sand back from the very entrance.

Mona, with its most beautiful of dining-rooms all in dark woods and mushara/bieh, with its own vegetable garden, its ice-cold spring, and its swimming bath (dream of drowsey summer days I); Mena, where the windows open to the very essence of garden, of desert, and of flooding sunshine, so through them blow the sweet breezes over polished boards that scorn the winter discontent of carpets; Mena, whose broad verandah looks up at old Cheops's ponderous vesting place. / 1 remember a palm growing before that verandah; it always reminded me of a beautiful woman dreadfully growing old. In' the ruthless sun the wrinkles and scragginesses showed— dust upon imperfect fronds. But as the soft whispers of twilight sighed from put of the east, she prinked and pruned herself with a thousand soft shakings and shiverings; a thousand murmurs to. the eager night of youth and the blinded eyes of youth. _ When the sun had flung himself on in his burning chase of night, and the afterglow of his passion paled and quivered and pale again; when the moon threw up her veil of mist-gold and flung wide her pale, cold arms in eternal desire to gain his ardent embrace; when black and purple night, all full of boding and. slow jealousies, crept after her in sweeping hate; then the old palm hold out her arms to the electric lamps and found her old grey-green rcgilded in his light. And sitting on the verandah one could see her outcurve'd fronds dully glow against the velvet sky, and watch the black bulk of Cheops's tomb start into solemn relief.

What strange things happened upon those nights of the full moon when she swept across the sleeping sky and filled the air with a dream phantasy of mingled day and night!. Out from Cairo's distant shadow creeps a black and yellow dragon with one centred flaming cyo and a voice of clanging metal. "Watch him creep along the white line of road, spitting nlectric lire from the God of Power in the copper wire above him. Watch him stop where the road ends, with a groan of iron hands a-clutch at his revolving heels. And watch those who leave him and wander forth into tho dreamlight of tho moon.