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On the Humours of the Desert 307
tints of rose or azure according as the sun is on them or
behind them.
The desert often comes down to the very edge of the river,
where there are rocks.
The place from which most people see the desert
Pyramids— just as good a bit as they are likely to see
is the
unless
they go to the Great Oasis or Khartum, which means their
spending a whole day in training across a desert without one
living thing: in it awav from the station-master's reed huts.
What is the desert like? It is what the bottom of the sea
would be like, if the waters parted once more, as they did on
its eastern edge, for the Israelites to pass over and Pharaoh to
be caught by the returning tide—an undulating bed of rock
and sand. The sand is pale gold at the Pyramids, and grows
deeper and deeper gold as you go farther and farther south.
At Abu Simbel, near the border line of Egypt and the
Sudan, the sand is almost the colour of an orange.
The main characteristic of the desert is moving sand, which
drifts round protuberances at the will of the wind. Old
desert watchers tell you that there is no drift in the desert
without a core of some sort ; and the sand sometimes gets
blown off the desert altogether, for a few acres, where it is flat,
revealing a clay or rock floor. I have ridden on bare clay
in the desert round the Great Oasis. It was strewn with the
debris of the flints worked thousands of years before our age.
But in the main the desert consists of sand, deep sand, too
soft for man or ass to walk on in comfort—the country for
which Nature provided the camel with wonderful sand-shoe
feet.
The surface of the desert is very uneven : hills, cliffs, and
boulders abound in it. All the quarries as well as all the
tombs of Egypt are in the desert ; the connection between a
quarry and a tomb was often very intimate; the most valu-
able quarries of all, those from which the purple porphyry of
the ancient world, which gave purple its name, was hewn, are
as good as buried by the hundred miles of desert which surround
them. And near Cairo there is a city of the quarries
of the Pharaohs more wonderful than the catacombs in the