We were a small party now. There were fewer than twenty of us--all English-speaking, except a young man who shared my apartment and was polite enough to pretend to understand my German.
It was a little after 5 A.M. when I heard him getting up. I inquired if there was "_Etwas los?_" which is the ship idiom for asking if anything had gone wrong. He said no, but that the sun would be upstanding directly, which brought me into similar action. One does not miss sunrises on the Nile, if one cares for sunrises anywhere. We hurried through our dressing and were out on the platform when the train drew up for water at Nag Hamadeh--a station like many others, surrounded by the green luxury of the Nile's fertile strip, with yellow desert and mountains pressing close on either hand. It was just before sunrise. The eastward sky was all resonant with ruddy tones--a stately overture of its coming. Uplifting palms, moveless in the morning air, broke the horizon line, while nearer lay the low village--compact and flat of roof--a vast, irregular hive built of that old material of Egypt, bricks without straw. Below it the Nile repeated the palms, the village, the swelling symphony of dawn. Only here and there was any sign of life. An Arab woman with a water-jar drowsed toward the river-bank; a camp of Bedouins with their camels and their tents were beginning to stir and kindle their morning fires. The railroad crosses the river here, and just as we were creeping out over the slow-moving flood the sun rose, and the orchestra of the sky broke into a majestic crescendo, as rare and radiant and splendid as it was when Memnon answered to its waking thrill and sang welcome to the day.
The young man and I had forgotten each other, I think, for neither of us had spoken for some moments. Then we both spoke at once--"_Wunderbar!_" we said, "_Wunderschon!_" for I have trained myself to speak German even when strongly moved. Then with one impulse we looked at our watches. It was precisely six, and we remembered that it was the 22d of March--the equinox.
We stayed out there and saw the land awake--that old land which has awakened so many times and in so much the same fashion. Outside of its cities and its temples it cannot have changed greatly since the days of Rameses. It is still just a green, fertile thread of life, watered and tilled in the manner of fifty centuries ago. They had to drag us in to breakfast at last, for we would be at Luxor before long, four hundred and fifty miles from Cairo; that is, at ancient Thebes, where--though the place has lingered for our coming a good four thousand years--"ze train he have not time to wait."