The sign is also significant because from this superb height the traveller first beholds the desert, out of which the great conquest came.
Every one has heard the great story of the Greeks who cried aloud in triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a stranger experience to see the earth afar off.

And few of us, strictly speaking, have ever seen the earth at all.

In cultivated countries it is always clad, as it were, in green garments.

The first sight of the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance.
The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation which it takes, at least as it borders upon the fields of Egypt, and as it is seen from the high places of Cairo.

Those who have seen the desert only in pictures generally think of it as entirely flat.
But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a line of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women.