Our way lies through monotonous desert regions where the hours and days are marked chiefly by the variations of the wonderful light.

Except for the phantasmagoria of the mornings and evenings, there is no outstanding feature on these dull-coloured banks, where may be seen, with never a change at all, the humble pastoral life of the fellahs.

The sun is burning, the starlit nights clear and cold.

A withering wind, which blows almost without ceasing from the north, makes you shiver as soon as the twilight falls.
One may travel for league after league along this slimy water and make head for days and weeks against its current--which glides everlastingly past the dahabiya, in little hurrying waves--without seeing this warm, fecundating river, compared with which our rivers of France are mere negligible streams, either diminish or increase or hasten.

And on the right and left of us as we pass are unfolded indefinitely the two parallel chains of barren limestone, which imprison so narrowly the Egypt of the harvests: on the west that of the Libyan desert, which every morning the first rays of the sun tint with a rosy coral that nothing seems to dull; and in the east that of the desert of Arabia, which never fails in the evening to retain the light of the setting sun, and looks then like a mournful girdle of glowing embers.