ABSTRACT
By half-past seven I was on deck. Looking at my chess-board chart of the canal, and then at one of the numbered piles beyond the fairway, I discovered we were just leaving Timsah (or Ismailia), painted white on the chart and numbered forty- ve on the pile. Crossing to the starboard, or Egyptian, side, my attention was rst drawn to three stately camels majestically moving across a waste of sand towards the bank of the canal. en my eyes fell upon a solitary felucca lying silent and inert on the water close at hand, with a huge white sail idly apping in the gentle breeze, and manned by a solitary fellah asleep in the sunbaked bow. e whole desert on either bank was a blaze of monochrome — sand eternal — sand in hills, sand in valleys, sand in a million fantastic, wind-blown shapes. And with the sand the same everlasting silence. Not an echo across the undulating seas of desert; not a cry from any living man or creature: merely the even and musical rhythm of the ship’s slowly revolving screws and the unfathomable riddle of the sand.
