Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/80

62 certain mountains from a distance, usually are; and, finally, after a drive of about an hour and a quarter from Cairo you pull up before the pleasant terrace of the Mena House Hotel, with the world-famed Pyramid of Cheops—all but the oldest, as it is quite the vastest of those great sepulchres—a few hundred yards from the spot at which you alight. Yet, now that you have reached it, the chances are that it is not this huge structure which first arrests your gaze. Unless, indeed, you are a fanatical Egyptologist first, and a Nature worshipper afterwards, it is upon the landscape you have left behind, and not on that in front of you that your eye will be fixed. Assuredly will this be so with any one who here for the first time makes acquaintance with that most delightful of earthly sights—the yellow desert marching league on league with the river-belt of vivid green. Far as the eye can travel stretches out that union of the living and the dead—the arid Libyan wilderness, its parched and stony