Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/105

 becoming subdued to a solemn mood, that might best find expression in the fearful lines beginning

I heard coming round the cliff a strain of a different character. It was not exactly Church-music, and yet it sounded familiar. Where had I heard it? It began

 The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device — Excelsior!"

and was followed by the chorus so familiar to college boys, and which is given out with the greater force of lungs, as it is incomprehensible in meaning: "Upidee! Upida!" And as if this were not enough to banish all the sacred associations of the place, next came this still more irreverential strain:

 "The waiter roared it through the hall — We don't give bread with one fishball!"

These were strange sounds indeed to be echoed back from the cliffs and down the abysses of Mount Serbal. But they did me more good than the most majestic psalm, for the sudden revulsion of feeling made me forget my weariness, and a few minutes enabled me to recover breath for a fresh spring. And so at last, pushed and pulled and hauled by the Arabs, and almost carried in their black arms, I reached the top. The ascent had taken six hours.

We found the summit not a peak so much as a dome — a rounded mass of granite. Serbal is about the height of Mount Washington, but this gives no impression of its real grandeur: for while Mount Washington rises by a gradual slope, its sides being covered with forests, Serbal rises so perpendicularly that its five separate masses appear, as I have said, like gigantic columns, lifting their