One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe me.  
"That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at hand.
 
"Crete!" said I.
 
"Yes," he said, "Crete."
 
He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis, "is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,—quite the most wonderful."
 
"Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the best we can build to-day. And things—like modern things. They had bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms—and admirable sanitation—admirable. Practically—American. They had better artists to serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of gold, sir—you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing, too—before the Phœnicians. No man can read it now, and there it is. Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day—They grow oranges and lemons. And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up to a certain pitch and then—grew tired.... All this ; it's a tired sea...."
 
That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."
 
"In our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the w............