THE SPELL OF EGYPT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13722, 11 April 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SPELL OF EGYPT.

"Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost dreams of old: to gild your, life with the drowsy gold of romance, to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours ate sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt''" These fascinating question* arc asked by Mr. Robert Hichens, in the first of. a, most interesting series of articles in the Century, illustrated by very striking pictures by Jules Guerin. "The Sphinx will not aide you, will not care. ' The Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones 'to the char and wonderful skies. h;<vt! held. Mill hold, their secrets; but tii vdo not seek for your.-. The terrific temples, the hotf, mysterious tombs, odorous of th- dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will mock you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchant*, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunesthese will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your, perhaps, yearning hunger of tho heart and the imagination. Vet Egypt it nut unresponsive. THE LVSTKE OK EGTl*x's LIFE, "I came back to her with dread, after 14 years of absence filled for me with the rumours of her changes. Aud on the very day of my arrival she calmly reassured mc. She told me in her supremely magical way that all was we'll with her. She taught me once more a lesson I had not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again —the lesson that Egypt, owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to Khefwr. although she owes her marvels to men; that when he created the sun which shines upon her, he gave her the lustre of her life, and that those who come to her must be sun-wor-shippers if they woidd truly and intimately understand the treasure of romance that lies heaped within her bosom. "Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in the Boat of the Sun. If you would love Egypt rightly, you too, must be a traveller in "that bark" You must not fear to steep yourself m the mystery of isold, in the mystery of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered out of the sun. Tinsacred white lotus must Ik- your emblem, and Horus, the hawk-headed, merged in Ha. your special deity. Scarcely had I set foot once more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the Sun and soothed my fears to sleep. THE AMAZING SPHINX. " It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the history of man that a man was able to contain within his mind, to conceive, the conception of the Sphinx. That he could carry it out in the stone is amazing. But how" much more amazing it is that before there was the Sphinx ho was able to see it with his imagination! One may criticise the Sphinx. One. may say impertinent things that are true about it: that seen from behind at a distance its head looks like an enormous mushroom growing in the s»nd, that its cheeks are swelled inordinately, that its thin-lipped mouth is legal, that from certain places it bears a resemblance to a prize bulldog. Ml this does not matter at ull. _ Whan does matter is that into the conception and execution of the Sphinx has been poured a supreme imaginative power. He who created it looked beyond Egypt, beyond the life of man. He grasped the conception of Eternity, and realised,the nothingness of Time, and he rendered it in btoue.'