Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/277

Rh Desert to find the ten commandments and the Mosaic laws. Vanity of vanities—and is it not all vanity? Is not the life of the ascetics in the Desert vanity also? No, for they have denied the world. They have said No to Egypt and gone into the wilderness to seek a promised land. In their shrunken pearly faces is written a different allegiance from that of Pharaoh. They deny that this world is our world, that our life is our true life, that death is really death.

But we do not condemn the gay crowd that imagination has summoned from the linen wrappings of the tombs, nor the glimmering of khaki and burnous in the purlieus of Cairo in that moment we call 1915. Mankind is one and indivisible.

Outside the city stand the three triangles and the woman's head, signs written in the sand which might cause all people to know that there was some mystery about Cairo.

The dead are sleeping and you cannot wake them. There are crowns on their heads, and they sleep that fixed, unearthly, steady sleep, undisturbed, untouched, uncorrupted. Egypt that was is dreaming Egypt that is. Out in the Desert sits the Sphinx with an I-am-that-I-am expression on its face.