Algernon Blackwood

“ There is awe in it, a hint of cold eternity, a glimpse of something unchanging and terrific, yet, at the same time, soft and very tender too.⁠ ⁠... The pictures unroll and spread. You feel again the untold melancholy of the Nile. The grandeur of a hundred battered temples beats upon the heart. There is a sense of unutterable beauty. Something in you bows to the procession that includes great figures of nonhuman lineage. Up sweeps the electric desert air, the alive wind, the wild and delicate perfume of the sand; the luminous grey shadows brush you ”

“ Their towering heads, coiffed with zodiacal signs, or grotesque with animal or bird, bend down to watch you everywhere. There is no hurry in them; they move with the leisure of the moon, with the stateliness of the sun, with the slow silence of the constellations. But they move. There is, between you and them, this effect of a screen, erected by the ages, yet that any moment may turn thin and let them through upon you. ”

“ But out there the days swam past in a flood of golden light, and, caught in a procession of ancient splendours, changeless as the leisured Nile, majestic as the desert, and fresh still with the wonder that first created them, you moved with the tide as of some unconditioned world. Egypt steals out and whispers to you in your dreams. Once more you float in an atmosphere of passionate mirages.⁠ ⁠... ”

“ Similarly, in Egypt, there is something that forever evades capture in the monstrous details of sheer size, beautiful with majesty, that tower above the shrinking reason. The land exhales a steam of enchantment that lulls the senses. ”

“ A sound recalls the street cries of the Arabs, with its haunting singsong melody; a breath of air brings back the heated sand, the rustle of the curtain whispers as the palms and acacia whisper⁠—and the truth is realised. Up steals the immense Egyptian glamour. It pours, it rushes up. It is over you in a moment. All this time it has lain coiled in deep recesses of the inner being⁠—recesses where there is silence because they are inaccessible amid the clamour of daily life. ”

“ Yet, behind the post card, behind the adjectives, and sure to emerge for full recognition in due course, the mind remains aware of some huge, alluring thing, alive with a pageantry of ages, strangely brilliant in blue and gold, magnificent, appealing almost to tears⁠—something that drifts past like a ghostly full-rigged ship with crowded decks and painted sails, too vastly scaled for sight to take it in. ”

“ Egypt is endless and inexhaustible; some hint of eternity lies there, an awareness of immortality almost. Today, after a doze of four or five thousand years, subterranean Egypt peeps up again at the sun. ”

“ An Arab on his donkey flits in colour across the mind, melting off into tiny perspective. A string of camels stands against the sky, swaying forward the same moment as though it never ceased. A dozen pyramids cleave the air with monstrous wedges, pointing holes in space. ”

“ Egypt, with a power of seduction almost uncanny, has robbed the mind of a faculty best described perhaps as the faculty of measurement. Its scale has stupefied the ability to measure, appraise, estimate; and this balance, once destroyed, wonder and awe capture the heart, going what pace they please. Size works half the miracle, for it is size including a quality of terror⁠—monstrous ”

“ You draw a deep breath of astonishment⁠—then give up the vain attempt to grapple with a thing you cannot readily assimilate. A dizziness of star-distances steals over you; there is a breathlessness of astronomical scale in it that exhilarates while it stuns. ”

“ All countries, of course, colour thought and memory, stirring imagination in any but the hopelessly inanimate⁠—whence the educational value of travel-psychology⁠—but, whereas from Greece, Japan, India, the traveller returns with reports he can evoke at will and label, he returns from Egypt with a marvellous blur that defies detailed description. ”

“ All moves to a statelier measure. Stern issues of life and death are in the air, and in the grandeur of the tombs and temples there is a solemnity of genuine awe that makes the blood run slow a little. ”

“ An effect that does not pass away is wrought subtly upon the mind, an effect that not being properly comprehensible, is nameless. Having once “gone down into Egypt,” one is never quite the same again; having drunk of the water of the Nile, there is a yearning to drink of it again. ”

“ A hand of shadow, but with granite grip, may steal forth and draw you away into some region where they dwell among changeless symbols like themselves, a region vast, ancient and undifferentiated as the desert that has produced them. Their effect in the end is weird, difficult to describe, but real. Talk with a mind that has been steeped for years in their atmosphere and presence, and you will appreciate this odd reality. The spell of Egypt is an otherworldly spell. ”

“ Moreover, it is the casual visitor, unburdened by antiquarian and archeological knowledge, who may best estimate this power: the tourist who knows merely what he has gleaned, say, from Baedeker’s general synopsis, is more freshly sensitive to it than the excavator or official who has lived long in the country. He becomes aware, too, that it is all the more enchanting because he is unable to define and analyse it. ”

“ What mind can gain by the information that our sun, with all its retinue of planets, sweeps daily 1,000,000 miles nearer to Hercules, yet that Hercules looks no closer than it did thousands of years ago, when Tut-ankh-Amen was laid to rest? ”