Algernon Blackwood

“ The heaps of piled-up sand suggest their heavy, drooping jowls, and the thick lips of yellow sandstone or pallid white lime curve here and there a little above protruding jaws with an expression difficult to describe, but clearly discernible. The heads, moreover, have a hooded appearance; and sometimes in the same section of cliff may be seen a profile and a full face side by side. They stare across the waste of wilderness with an air of serene contempt that, as I have said, seems only just to conceal a definite smile. ”

“ A giant holds a fairy by the fingertip⁠—yet somehow it is her tenderness that wields the greater spell. For it runs, soft as little children, through the ruin, an enormous tenderness, unfathomable, even inexplicable, modifying beyond description the monstrous element it has so strangely mated. This, and an endless, ineffable peace became for me the passwords to the desert that begins at Helouan and stretches through many thousand miles down to the great Sahara itself. ”

“ Few who know the Desert will agree, least of all those who know its perils at close quarters, and have read into it the emotions of their own severe personal experience. For what rushed into me as the vital key-word that summed up a thousand amazing impressions can only be expressed by a term that one has really no right to apply to inanimate Nature⁠—tenderness. ”

“ To speak of mountains in the Desert sounds queer enough no doubt; but anyone who expects to find a mere endless stretch of Margate sands⁠—though, of course, there are vast regions of smooth, soft sand in other parts across the Nile and a further south⁠—will be surprised at the gorges, ridges, summits, and high, flat plateaux terminating in precipitous cliffs, break the Desert here for hundreds of miles into diverse and rugged scenery that really belongs to mountainous country. ”

“ II From Helouan one may study with never-ceasing interest, even though not geologically expert, the curious phenomenon of the Desert film. This and the examination of the results of erosion are questions of wonder that go with one upon every trip. The surface of the plateaux is a darkly shining crust, often nearly black, and sometimes a deep purply hue that makes one think at once of volcanic rocks. Beneath it, where the face of the worn cliffs becomes visible, one sees the bright colouring of the softer red and yellow sandstone or the whitish limestone. ”

“ The sea must lie just beyond that next line of hills that stand against the blue⁠—for the illusion that the sea lies somewhere close is ever present. Yet, though so much of this Desert along the Nile Delta has been under the sea quite recently, geologically speaking (about six thousand years ago, authorities claim, and as far as Assouan) , you will look for the sea as vainly as you may look for any results of genuine water-work in all this wilderness of bewildering and fantastic erosion that makes the Helouan Desert so indescribably fascinating. ”

“ In more exposed places, especially near the top of a plateau, where the driving force must be considerably greater, the softer layers are picked out and carried off with ease, and the hard, ribbed edges of the tougher strata project like the bones of giant skeletons. This curious terraced result gives birth to singular outlines, animal and human outlines, monstrous shapes that lift their heads to watch you as you pass beneath them. And they all run into a mould which may be described as sphinx-like. The Desert round Helouan is filled with these embryonic sphinxes. ”

“ And everywhere is a loose, friable rubble that settles into soft powder beneath the feet. Climbing here is a dangerous and exciting business altogether!
But, next to this striking colouring, it is the sculpture of the rocky cliffs due to erosion that touches the imagination, and touches it very powerfully. Many of the gorges run to a depth of several hundred feet, the soft, lower strata worn away, and the resisting siliceous layers left upon the top like solid tablecloths. These valleys end abruptly, often in a cirque⁠—a crater-like semicircle of sheer cliff. ”

“ My windows in a cool and airy building, formerly a viceregal palace, with spacious halls, wide, lofty corridors, and palms that rustle endlessly in a shady garden, look forth to the Pyramids across the strip of brilliant vegetation where the Nile meanders with its freight of sweeping, pointed sails that rise like great wings of birds from the very ground. ”

“ The sand comes driving up in thick clouds, travelling at a high rate of speed, strikes the wall and, finding no way of escape, tears round and round with an effect like sheets of emery-paper. It scours the cliffs and wears all roughness down. ”

“ The absence of any object, such as trees, by which a standard of measurement were possible, makes it extraordinarily difficult to judge either size or distance. These domed and turreted knolls that poke their heads on all sides to the sky seem at first several miles away⁠—then, suddenly, are in front of you. ”

“ The eroding instruments have been of a simpler, quieter kind, tireless but gentler, continuing their delicate labour for centuries, almost with tenderness. Alone their results are so stupendous. For the erosion, which I shall presently describe, is due to meteorological conditions⁠—rain, dew, temperature, especially changes of temperature, unequal expansion of various rock constituents, the varying hardness of the different strata, and⁠—the ceaseless friction of the wind-borne sand. ”

“ And in the daytime, too, it is equally difficult to believe that the temperature, in this dry, stimulating air, is what the thermometer proclaims. The sunshine pricks the skin, but there is no discomfort; you can walk and ride, play tennis or climb the sandy mountains without any of the exhaustion that usually goes with 80-deg in the shade. ”

“ The level strata lend them a stern expression that is forbidding, even menacing, and beneath the huge, straight eyebrows, with lidless, staring eyes, you easily divine a kind of smile they scarcely take the trouble to conceal. ”

“ One has only to try to scale the cliffs to find how everything crumbles at the touch. Lumps of rock that look hard as iron are found to be utterly honeycombed by the dissolving of their more soluble constituents through the action of heat and water. They fall into dust by the pressure of the hand. ”

“ The flints are uniformly coloured on any one surface. Where the colour is uniform in tint the stone is uniform in composition, but where the stone is coloured unequally the black or darker portions are harder and more siliceous than the rest. ”