Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/226

 into clear and sharply outlined view. It is as though the sun, instead of having just set, were about to rise; it is like the dawn of a new day. Brighter and brighter grows the afterglow, and more and more golden as it brightens, the red rays of the prism which assume such prominence in most European sunsets seeming here—no doubt for some good optical reason, if one only knew it—to be far surpassed in intensity by the yellow. To describe the mysterious, the almost "eerie" light-effect produced by this flood of liquid gold immersing and suffusing the whole earth for long after the sun's disc has disappeared, and while the northern and eastern skies are darkening every minute, is impossible; but the nearest though a distant resemblance to it that one remembers in England is to be found in that unearthly light that sometimes gleams luridly under a brazen-bellied thunder-cloud on a sultry summer afternoon. Things look just as spectral in the Egyptian afterglow as they do with us