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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



with lights and shades and tints endlessly varying in shape and hue, 

 from hour to hour, and almost from minute to minute, as the sun runs 

 his course, they have a strange and unique beauty. Moreover, in 

 early spring, the edges of the greenery of the plain lie sharply defined 

 against the yellow sands and gray-brown stones of the waste as if it 

 were so much water. 



When I was in Cairo, ten years ago, I delighted in wandering 

 about the heights of the Mokattam range, which rise for some four 

 or five hundred feet immediately to the east of the city. The Sahara 

 itself can not better deserve the name of desert than do these stony 

 solitudes. Looking westward at sunset, the vultures, diminished to 

 mere crows, wheeled about the face of the cliffs far below. Beneath 

 and beyond them, the green expanse stretched northward, until it be- 

 came lost in the horizon ; while, toward the west, its even line fol- 

 lowed the contour of the Libyan shore, as if it were the veritable sea- 

 water of the Gulf of Herodotus. And sharply defined against the 

 western sky, the great pyramid, which, even in its present mutilated 

 state, reared its summit to the level of my eye, threw its long shadow 

 eastward like the gnomon of an appropriately gigantic dial-plate. 



Indeed, the comparison is not far-fetched. For the great shadow 

 has veritably swept, from west to north and from north to east, day 

 after day from the dawn of civilization till now ; since the toiling 

 subjects of Chufu, with patient and skillful labor, piled the great 

 stones of his tomb, one upon another, it has marked the birth-hour, 

 and sometimes the death-hour, of each great nation known to history. 



For all these ages, day after day, the shadow, as it lengthened 

 eastward, has swept over the weary heads of thousands upon thou- 

 sands of orderly, cheerful, hard-working men, women, and children, 

 who have been plundered, starved, beaten, decimated, now to serve 

 the ambition or gratify the superstitious vanity of an ancient Pharaoh, 

 and now to enable some thinly varnished savage of a modern Khedive 

 to subsidize his opera troupe in Cairo, and squander the price of their 

 blood among foreign harlots and foreign swindlers. 



Six thousand years of grinding oppression, worse than it ever was 

 during the last few centuries, seemed to me a curious reward for lay- 

 ing the foundations of civilization ; and yet there was no sign that 

 the great shadow was likely, for another century or so, to mark the 

 hour when Khedive, mudirs, commercial Mamelukes of various nation- 

 alities, and all the rest of the "wolves that with privy paw devour 

 apace and nothing said" should be swept away to make room for that 

 even moderately decent and intelligent rule which is all the Egyptian 

 people need to become, at last, a contented and a wealthy nation. 



But this, I say, was ten years ago ; many things Tel-el-Kebir 

 among the rest have happened since then ; and perhaps the good 

 time may be coming. At any rate, the great British panacea consti- 

 tutional government is to be administered ; and if the Fellaheen 



