But spite of all these people, in spite, too, of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on arrival there is ravishing.
A very fairyland--but a fairyland quite different from that of Stamboul.
For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre above the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is spread out simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert and dominated by chaotic rocks.

Thousands of minarets rise up on every side like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can see their innumerable slender points--but instead of being simply, as at Stamboul, so many white spires, they are here complicated by arabesques, by galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to have borrowed the reddish colour of the desert.
The flat rocks tell of a region which formerly was without rain.

The innumerable palm-trees of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and houses, sway their plumes in the wind, bewildered as it were by these clouds laden with cold showers.

In the south and in the west, at the extreme limits of the view, as if upon the misty horizon of the plains, appear two gigantic triangles.

They are Gizeh and Memphis--the eternal pyramids.
At the north of the town there is a corner of the desert quite singular in its character--of the colour of bistre and of mummy--where a whole colony of high cupolas, scattered at random, still stand upright in the midst of sand and desolate rocks.