Robert Hichens

Egypt and Its Monuments (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

WHY do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance, to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are sullen, gray, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt? The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will mock you with their brooding silence, with their dim and somber repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes-these will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of the heart and the imagination. Yet Egypt is not unresponsive. I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years of absence-years filled for me with the rumors of her changes. And on the very day of my arrival she calmly reassured me. She told me in her supremely magical way that all was well with her. She taught me once more a lesson I had not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again-the lesson that Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to Kheper, although she owes her marvels to men; that when he created the sun which shines upon her, he gave her the luster of her life, and that those who come to her must be sun-worshipers if they would truly and intimately understand the treasure of romance that lies heaped within her bosom.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: PubMe
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Januar 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9791220253239
• Artikelnr.: 60959144

Autorenporträt

Robert Hichens, a British sailor born on September 16, 1882, was on the deck of the RMS Titanic when it sank during her maiden voyage. He was in control of the Lifeboat, and he stubbornly declined to go back and save any more drowning people. He wed Florence Mortimore in Devon, England, in 1906. His refusal to return to the scene of the catastrophe to rescue victims was charged by passengers. claimed he criticised those at the oars and dubbed people in the water "stiffs." Hichens would later claim, in statements provided to the United States Senate inquiry, that he had never used the term "stiffs" to describe bodies and that he had instead used other terms. He was imprisoned in 1933 for attempting to kill Harry Henley and freed in 1937. In 1931, his wife and kids moved away from him to Southampton, where he started drinking heavily. Hichens, died from heart failure on 23 September 1940 at 58, on board the English Trader, as the ship was docked off the shore of Aberdeen, Scotland. His remains were buried in Aberdeen's Trinity Cemetery in Section 10, Lair 244.