EGYPT

The old Nile drags yellow waters through the plains in Moorish hold,

Over him the sky of Egypt hangs, split up by fire and gold;

On his banks, both flat and sandy, reeds grow upward from the deep,

Mystically, in the sunlight, airy gems and blossoms glow –

Some are white and tall and fragile as the silver-flakes of snow,

Others, red as burning embers, others blue as eyes that weep.

And among the broom-shrubs, growing green, deep-rooted, thick-set, stout,

Birds in nests domesticated swell their beauteous feathers out

And with lengthy beaks extended in the sunlight, bill and coo.

Drowned by his eternal fancies, sprung from sacred springs, the stream

Drives his crystal-amber mirror and his legendary dream

To the sea that drowns his yearnings, silent, measureless, and blue.

Verdant fields and happy countries are along his banks outspread,

Memphis, with its ancient buildings, can be sighted far ahead,

Wall on wall, boulder on boulder, a colossi's stone domain,

Architectural ideas worthy of some great magician!

They raised mountain upon mountain and their old daring ambition

Silver-plated them that sunbeams might enkindle the whole chain,

As if risen when the Dreamland of the desert was abloom,

From the silver-looking sand-dunes wakened up by the simoom,

Like a thought of holy waters mirrored by the fiery vault

And thrown off into a distance... Each a continental shelf,

Rise the pyramids alongside, deathless all like Death himself,

Coffins that can offer lodging to the epic of a skald.

It grows dark... The Nile is sleeping, stars are peeping out, the Moon

Chases them among the cloud-racks, casts her face in the lagoon.

Who has opened up the entrance leading to the pyramid?

It is he, the king; apparelled in a garb of gems and gold,

He has gone inside, desirous the past ages to behold.

His heart breaks when he uncovers of old times the heavy lid.

Vainly try the kings to govern o'er the worlds as the world needs,

Inauspicious signs wax quickly, ever fewer are good deeds;

Vainly try they to decipher life's still undeciphered sense.

He seeks out the night... his shadow, stretching long and dark, is caught

By the long waves of the river. Thus the phantom of his thought

Casts itself along and merges with the peoples' waves, immense.

The old pyramid's chimeras, the cold waters of the Nile

Or the murmur of the rushes in the Moon's all-piercing smile –

Numberless gigantic bundles of long, thin, silvery lances -,

All the splendours of the water, of the deserts, of the night,

Join to put on that old kingdom robes of the most proud and bright,

To bring back to life in wildness legions of beguiling trances.

And the sacred river's ripples never cease to tell and sing

Of the misty, long dead ages, of the secret of his spring ...

Dizzy grows the soul with fancies that glide gently in their flight,

Gilded over by the moonbeams, scattered in the groves, the palms

Proudly lift towards the heavens their long, slender stems and arms,

Waves crave foam, skies gather clouddrifts. Clear and brilliant is the night.

And in the majestic temples, in the marble colonnade,

Gods walk up and down at night-time, in their mantles white arrayed,

And the high priests' chants and dirges in the silver harps resound;

In the winds borne from the desert, in the chill of the black air,

The tall pyramids' tops murmur, frenzied as in a nightmare,

With the pharaohs wailing grimly in the giant stony mound.

In the ancient building rises, right in front, the Moorish tower.

In his golden glass the magus looks intent at this late hour

How the countless stars of heaven gather in a kind of nest,

In the miniature he watches their unfathomable courses

And whatever he discovers, his long wand on maps endorses;

He has found the world's quintessence, what is right, what good, what best.

And, maybe, as an ill-omen for a vitiated nation,

For crime-blotted kings, for prelates given all to fornication,

The old magus, guard of vengeance, reads the mystic sign awry,

And the storm destroys the sandbeds of the desert's plains and downs,

It chokes life out of the cities and makes coffin from the towns

Of a people walking lifeless on a ground depleted dry.

The tornado runs its horses till they shudder, drop and sink;

In our days but deserts water sand-dunes on the river's brink,

Scattering them wildly over what was once a blooming land,

Memphis, Thebes, and the whole country turned to ashes long ago;

Pristine Bedouin kinspeople, crossing deserts to and fro,

Sun their eerie, gaunt existence in the plains of flying sand.

But e'en now, breaking the star-lamps on the long waves of the Nile,

Red flamingoes stalk the water, slow and cautious all the while;

And the Moon bedecks with silver the Egyptian land of yore.

At such times we wax so dreamful of the panoply of ages!

Now and then some voice primeval does our modern ear engage;

From the quarrel of the wavelets prophecies come to the fore.

In the meantime Memphis rises like the desert's silver thought,

The most masterly arch-pattern that the hurricane has wrought.

To the Bedouin in moonlight it is spell and mystery,

So they spin fantastic stories fringed by flowers and constellations

Of the city that emerges from the dreary desolations;

Ever louder sounds are swelling from beneath the land and sea.

There are bells upon the sea-bed and they ring the night throughout;

At the bottom of the river golden apples grow about;

In the sands of the vast desert has a people passed away,

But it wakes again together with the cities, then it clambers

Up into the courts of Memphis and their brightly lighted chambers;

There they drink their wine and bellow every night till break of day.

Translated by Leon Levitchi

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