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(From Kéramos)
AND now the winds that southward blow, | |
| And cool the hot Sicilian isle, | |
| Bear me away. I see below | |
| The long line of the Lybian Nile, | |
| Flooding and feeding the parched lands | 5 |
| With annual ebb and overflow: | |
| A fallen palm whose branches lie | |
| Beneath the Abyssinian sky, | |
| Whose roots are in Egyptian sands. | |
| On either bank huge water-wheels, | 10 |
| Belted with jars and dripping weeds, | |
| Send forth their melancholy moans, | |
| As if, in their gray mantles hid, | |
| Dead anchorites of the Thebaid | |
| Knelt on the shore and told their beads, | 15 |
| Beating their breasts with loud appeals | |
| And penitential tears and groans. | |
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| This city, walled and thickly set | |
| With glittering mosque and minaret, | |
| Is Cairo, in whose gay bazaars | 20 |
| The dreaming traveller first inhales | |
| The perfume of Arabian gales, | |
| And sees the fabulous earthen jars, | |
| Huge as were those wherein the maid | |
| Morgiana found the Forty Thieves | 25 |
| Concealed in midnight ambuscade; | |
| And seeing more than half believes | |
| The fascinating tales that run | |
| Through all the Thousand Nights and One, | |
| Told by the fair Scheherezade. | 30 |
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| More strange and wonderful than these | |
| Are the Egyptian deities— | |
| Ammon, and Emoth, and the grand | |
| Osiris, holding in his hand | |
| The lotus; Isis, crowned and veiled; | 35 |
| The sacred Ibis, and the Sphinx; | |
| Bracelets with blue-enamelled links; | |
| The Scarabee in emerald mailed, | |
| Or spreading wide his funeral wings; | |
| Lamps that perchance their night-watch kept | 40 |
| O’er Cleopatra while she slept,— | |
| All plundered from the tombs of kings. | |
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