 To rob the dead was always a lucrative trade at Thebes, and we may be certain that the splendid pharaohs who slept in the valley of the tombs of the kings went to their dark palaces magnificently equipped for the life to come. When indeed one thinks of the jewels, furniture, vases, ointments, clothing, arms, and precious documents, which were as certainly buried in those tombs as the royal mummies for whom they were excavated, it seems far more wonderful that the pair of one queen should have escaped, rather than that all the rest of these dead-and-gone royalties should have fallen among Thebes. Of all the tombs in the valley of Bob Almolec one would rather, I think, have discovered that of Rameses III, as he was one of the richest of the pharaohs, and an undoubted virtuoso in his tastes, so we may be sure that his tomb was furnished with all kinds of beautiful and precious things. What would we not give now to find some of those elaborate gold and silver vases, those cushioned thrones and sofas, those bows and quivers and shirts of mail so carefully catalogued on the walls of the side chambers in the first corridor? I do not doubt that specimens of all these things were buried with the king and left ready for his use. He died believing that his car would enjoy and make use of these treasures, and that his soul would come back after long cycles of probation and make its home once more in the mummied body. He thought he should rise as from sleep, cast off his bandages, eat and be refreshed and put on sandals and send investments, and take his staff in his hand and go forth again into the light of everlasting day. Poor ghost wandering bodyless through space! Where now are thy funeral-baked meats, thy changes of raiment, thy perfumes and precious ointments? Where is that body for which thou art once so solicitous, and without which resurrection is impossible? One fancies thee sighing forlorn through these desolate halls when all is silent and the moon shines down the valley. Life at Thieves is made up of incongruities. A morning among temples is followed by an afternoon of antiquity hunting, and a day of meditation among tombs winds up with a dinner-party on board some friends da habia, or a fantasia at the British consulate. El and the writer did their fair share of antiquity hunting, both at Luxor and elsewhere, but chiefly at Luxor. I may say indeed that our life here was one long pursuit of the pleasures of the chase. The game, it is true, was prohibited, but we enjoyed it nonetheless because it was illegal. Perhaps we enjoyed it the more. There were whispers about this time of a tomb that had been discovered on the western side, a wonderful tomb rich in all kinds of treasure. No one, of course, had seen these things. No one knew who had found them. No one knew where they were hidden. But there was a solemn secrecy about certain of the Arabs, and a conscious look about some of the visitors, and an air of awakened vigilance about the government officials, which savored of mystery. These rumours by and by assumed more definite proportions. Dark hints were dropped of a possible papyrus, the M.B.'s babbled of mummies, and an American da habia lying innocently off Karnak was reported to have a mummy on board. Now neither El nor the writer desired to become the happy proprietor of an ancient Egyptian, but the papyrus was a thing to be thought of. In a fatal hour we expressed a wish to see it. From that moment every mummy-snatcher in the place regarded us as his lawful prey. Beguiled into one den after another we were shown all the stolen goods and thieves. Some of the things were very curious and interesting. In one house we were offered two bronze vases, each with a band of delicately engraved hieroglyphs running round the lip. Also a square stand of basket work in two colours, precisely like that engraved in Sir G. Wilkinson's first volume after the original in the Berlin Museum. Pieces of mummy case and a wall sculpture and several tablets abounded, and on one occasion we were introduced into the presence of a mummy. All these houses were tombs, and in this one the mummy was stowed away in a kind of recess at the end of a long, rock-cut passage, probably the very place once occupied by the original tenant. It was a mummy of the same period as that which we saw disentombed under the auspices of the Governor, and was enclosed in the same kind of cartonage, patterned in many colours on a white ground. I shall never forget that curious scene, the dark and dusty vault, the Arabs with their lanterns, the mummy in its gaudy sermons lying on an old mat at our feet. Meanwhile we tried in vain to get sight of the coveted papyrus. A grave Arab dropped in once or twice after nightfall and talked it over vaguely with the Drago-man, but never came to the point. He offered it first with a mummy for one hundred pounds. Finding, however, that we would neither buy his papyrus unseen nor his mummy at any price, he haggled and hesitated for a day or two, evidently trying to play us off against some rival or rival's unknown, and finally disappeared. These rivals we afterwards found out were the M.B.'s. They bought both mummy and papyrus at an enormous price, and then unable to endure the perfume of their ancient Egyptian, drowned the deer departed at the end of a week. Other purchasers are possibly less sensitive. We heard at all events of fifteen mummies successfully insinuated through the Alexandrian Custom House by a single agent that winter. There is, in fact, a growing passion for mummies among Nile travelers. Unfortunately the prices rise with the demand, and although the fine is practically inexhaustible, a mummy nowadays becomes not only a prohibited but a costly luxury. At Luxor the British, American, and French consuls are Arabs. The Prussian consul is a copte. The Austrian consul is, or was, an American. The French consul showed us over the old tumbledown building called the French House, which, though but a rude structure of palm timbers and sun-dried clay, built partly against and partly over the temple of Luxor, has its place in history. For there, in 1829, Champollion and Rossellini lived and worked together during part of their long sojourn at Thebes. Rossellini tells how they used to sit up at night, dividing the fruits of the day's labour, Champollion copying whatever might be useful for his Egyptian grammar, and Rossellini the new words that furnished materials for his dictionary. There too lodged the naval officers sent out by the French in 1831 to remove the obelisk which now stands in the Place de la Concorde. And there, writing those charming letters that delight the world, Lady Duff Gordon lingered through the last few winters of her life. The rooms in which she first lived and the balcony in which she took such pleasure were no longer accessible owing to the ruinous state of one of the staircases, but we saw the rooms she last inhabited. Her couch, her rug, her folding chair, were there still. The walls were furnished with a few cheap prints and a pair of tin sconces. All was very bare and comfortless. We asked if it was just like this when the Sita lived here. The Arab consul replied that she had a table and some books. He looked himself in the last stage of consumption and spoke and moved like one that had done with life. We were shocked at the dreariness of the Place till we went to the window. That window, which commanded the Nile and the Western Plain of Thebes, furnished the room and made its poverty splendid. The sun was near setting. We could distinguish the mounds and the pylons of Medinit Habu and the site of the Ramassiam. The terraced cliffs overtopped by the pyramidal mountain of Bob El Mollack burned crimson against a sky of stainless blue. The footpath leading to the valley of the tombs of the kings showed like a hot white scar winding along the face of the rocks. The river gave back the sapphire tones of the sky. I thought I could be well content to spend many a winter in no matter how comfortless a lodging if I only had that wonderful view with its infinite beauty of light and color and space and its history and its mystery always before my windows. Another historical house is that built by Sir G. Wilkinson among the tombs of Sheikh Abed El Kourna. Here he lived while amassing the materials for his manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians and here Lepceus and his company of artists put up while at work on the Western bank. Science makes little impression on the native mind. No one now remembers Champollion or Rosalini or Sir G. Wilkinson, but every Arab in Luxor cherishes the memory of Lady Duff Gordon in his heart of hearts and speaks of her with blessing. The French house was built over the roof of the sanctuary at the southern end of the temple. At the northern end, built up between the enormous sandstone columns of the great colonnade, was the house of Musaffa Agha, most hospitable and kindly of British consuls. Musaffa Agha had traveled in Europe and spoke fluent Italian, English, and French. His eldest son was Governor of Luxor, his younger, the little Ahmed whom Lady Duff Gordon delighted to educate, having spent two years in England as the guest of Lord D, had become an accomplished Englishman. In the round of gaiety that goes on at Luxor the British consulate played the leading part. Musaffa Agha entertained all the English Dahabias and all the English Dahabias entertained Musaffa Agha. We were invited to several fantasias at the consulate and dined with Musaffa Agha at his suburban house the evening before we left Luxor. The appointed hour was 8.30 p.m. We arrived amid much barking of dogs and were received by our host in a large empty hall surrounded by a divan. Here we remained till dinner was announced. We were next ushered through an anti-room where two turbined and barefooted servants were in waiting, the one with a brass basin and ewer, the other with an armful of Turkish towels. We then each interred, held our hands over the basin, had water poured on them, and received a towel apiece. These towels we were told to keep, and they served for dinner napkins. The anti-room opened into a brilliantly lighted dining-room of moderate size, having in the center a round brass table with an upright fluted rim, like a big tray. For each person were placed a chair, a huge block of bread, a wooden spoon, two tumblers, and a bouquet, plates, knives, forks, there were none. The party consisted of the happy couple, the director of the Luxor telegraph office, El, the writer, Ahmed, and our host. Tonight we are all Arabs, said Musaffa Agha, as he showed us where to sit. We drank Nile water and we eat with our fingers. So we drank Nile water, and for the first time in our lives we ate with our fingers. In fact we found them exceedingly useful. The dinner was excellent. Without disrespect to our own accomplice-chef, or to the accomplice-chefs of our various friends upon the river, I am bound to say that it was the very best dinner I ever ate out of Europe. Everything was hot, quickly served, admirably dressed, and the best of its kind. Here is the menu. Menu March 31, 1874. White soup, turkey. Fish-fried Samnak. Entrees, stewed pigeons, spinach and rice. Roast, doll. Entrees, kebabs of mutton, kebabs of lamb's kidneys, tomatoes with rice. Roast. Turkey with cucumber sauce. Peel-off of rice. Second course. Mish-mish. Roast, bleben. Kunafa, totla. These dishes were placed one at a time in the middle of the table, and rapidly changed. Each dipped his own spoon in the soup, dived into the stew, and pulled off pieces of fish or lamb with his fingers. Having no plates we made plates of our bread. Meanwhile Mustafa Aga, like an attentive host, tore off an especially choice morsel now and then, and handed it to one or another of his guests. To eat gracefully with one's fingers is a fine art, to carve with them skillfully as a science. None of us, I think, will soon forget the wonderful way in which our host attacked and vanquished the turkey, a solid colossus weighing twenty pounds, and roasted to perfection. Off-rising he turned back his cuff, poised his wrist, and driving his forefinger and thumb deep into the breast brought out a long, stringy, smoking fragment which he deposited on the plate of the rider. Thus begun the turkey went round the table amid peels of laughter and was punished by each in turn. The peel-off which followed is always the last dish served in an Egyptian or Turkish dinner. After this our spoons were changed and the sweets were put upon the table. The drinks throughout were plain water, rice water, and lemonade. Some native musicians played in the anti-room during dinner, and when we rose from the table we washed our hands as before. We now returned to the large hall, and not being accomplished in the art and mystery of sitting cross-legged, curled ourselves up on the devans as best we could. The rider was conducted by Mustafa Agha to the corner seat at the upper end of the room, where he said the Princess of Wales had sat when their royal highnesses dined with him the year before. We were then served with pipes and coffee. The gentlemen smoked shabuks and cigarettes, while for us there were gorgeous rose-water narguilas with long, flexible tubes and amber mouthpieces. El had the Princess's pipe and smoked it very cleverly all the evening. By and by came the Governor, the Coddy of Luxor, the Prussian Consul and his son, and some three or four grave-looking merchants in rich silk robes and ample turbans. Meanwhile the band, two fiddles, a tambourine, a nedarabuka, played at intervals at the lower end of the hall, pipes, coffee and lemonade went continually around, and the entertainment wound up as native entertainments always do wind up at Luxor, with a performance of guazy. End of Section sixty-five. A thousand miles up the Nile, Section sixty-six. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter twenty-one, Thebes, Part six. We had already seen these dancers at two previous Fantasias, and we admired them no more the third time than the first. They wore baggy, turquish trousers, loose gowns of gaudy pattern, and a perfusion of jewelry. The premier danseuse was a fine woman and rather handsome, but in the bell of the company, a thick-lipped nubian, we could discover no charm whatever. The performances of the guazy, which are very ungraceful and almost wholly pantomimic, have been too often described to need description here. Only once indeed did we see them perform an actual dance, and then they swam lightly to and fro, clattering their castanets, crossing and recrossing and bounding every now and then down the whole length of the room. This dance, we were told, was of unknown antiquity. They sang occasionally, but their voices were harsh and their melodies inharmonious. There was present, however, one native performer whom we had already heard many times, and of whose skill we never tired. This was the leader of the little band, an old man who played the keminga, or coconut fiddle. A more unpromising instrument than the keminga it would be difficult to conceive, yet our old Arab contrived to make it discourse most eloquent music. His solos consisted of plaintive fares and extemporized variations, embroidered with difficult and sometimes extravagant cadenzas. He always began sedately, but warmed to his work as he went on, seeming at last to forget everything but his own delight in his own music. At such times one could see that he was weaving some romance in his thoughts, and translating it into sounds. As the strings throbbed under his fingers the whole man became inspired, and more than once when, in shower after shower of keen, despairing notes, he had described the wildest anguish of passion, I have observed his color change and his hand tremble. Although we heard him repeatedly, and engaged him more than once when we had friends to dinner, I am sorry to say that I forget the name of this really great artist. He is, however, celebrated throughout the febed, and is constantly summoned to airment Esna, Kenna, Gerga, and other large towns to perform at private entertainments. Well at Luxor we went one Sunday morning to the Coptic Church, a large building at the northern extremity of the village. Church, schools, and bishop's house are here grouped under one roof and enclosed in a courtyard, for Luxor is the center of one of the twelve seas into which Coptic Egypt is divided. The church, which has been rebuilt of late years, is constructed of sun-dried brick, having a small apse towards the east and at the lower or western end a screened atrium for the women. The center aisle is perhaps thirty feet in width. The side aisles, if aisles they can be called, being thickly planted with stone pillars supporting round arches. These pillars came from Karnak and were the gift of the Kediv. They have lotus-bud capitals and measure about fifteen feet high in the shaft. At the upper end of the nave, some eighteen or twenty feet in advance of the apse, there stands a very beautiful screen inlaid in the old Coptic style with cedar, ebony, rosewood, ivory, and mother of pearl. This screen is the pride of the church. Through the opening in the center one looks straight into a little wagon-roofed apse, which contains a small table and a suspended lamp, and is as dark as the sanctuary of an Egyptian temple. The reading desk, like a rickety office stool, faces the congregation and just inside the screen stands the bishop's chair. Upon this plan which closely resembles the plan of the first cathedral of St. Peter at Rome, most Coptic churches are built. They vary chiefly in the number of apces, some having as many as five. The atrium generally contains a large tank, called the Epiphany tank, into which, in memory of the baptism of our Lord, the men plunge at their festival of Elgitas. From Todros the son of the Prussian consul conducted us to the church. We went in at about eleven o'clock and witnessed the end of the service which had then been going on since daybreak. The atrium was crowded with women and children and the side aisles with men of the poorer sort. A few groups of better-dressed cops were gathered near the screen listening to a black robe deacon who stood reading at the reading desk with a lighted taper in his left hand. A priest in a white vestment embroidered on the breast and hood with a red Maltese cross was squatting on his heels at the entrance to the atatum. The bishop, all in black with a black turban, sat with his back to the congregation. Every face was turned upon us when we came in. The reader paused. The white-robed priest got up. Even the bishop looked round. Presently a couple of acolytes, each carrying two cane-bottom chairs came bustling down the nave and, unceremoniously driving away all were standing near, placed us in a row across the middle of the church. This interruption over the reading resumed. We now observed with some surprise that every word of the lessons as they were read in Coptic was translated Viva Voce into Arabic by a youth in a surplace who stood against the screen facing the congregation. He had no book but went on fluently enough following close upon the voice of the reader. This we were told was done only during the reading of the lessons, the Gospel and the Lord's Prayer. The rest of the services performed without translation, and the Coptic being a dead language is consequently unintelligible to the people. When the reading of the Gospel was over the deacon retired. The priest then came forward and made a sign to the school-children who ran up noisily from all parts of the church and joined with the choristers in a wild kind of chant. It seemed to us that this chant concluded the first part of the service. The second part closely resembled the celebration of mass. The priest came to the door of the screen, looked at the congregation, folded his hands palm to palm, went up to the threshold of the apse, and began reciting what sounded like a litany. He then uncovered the sacred vessels which till now had been concealed under two blue cotton handkerchiefs, and turning shook the handkerchiefs towards the people. He then consecrated the wine and wafer, elevated the host, and himself partook of the Eucharist in both elements. A little bell was rung during the consecration and again at the elevation. The people, meanwhile, stood very reverently, with their heads bent, but no one knelt during any part of the surface. After this, the officiating priest washed his hands in a brass basin, and the deacon, who was also the schoolmaster, came round the church holding up his scarf which was heaped full of little cakes of unleavened bread. These he distributed to all present, and acolyte followed with a plate and collected the offerings of the congregation. We now thought the service was over, but there remained four wee, crumpled, brown mites of babies to be christened. These small cops were carried up the church by four acolytes, followed by four anxious fathers. The priest then muttered a short prayer, crossed the babies with water from the basin in which he had washed his hands, drank the water, wiped the basin out with a piece of bread, ate the bread, and dismissed the newly made Christians with a hasty blessing. Finally the bishop, who had taken no part in the service, or even partaken of the Eucharist, came down from his chair and stood before the altar to bless the congregation. Hereupon all the men and boys ranged themselves in single file and trooped through between the screen and the apps, crowding in at one side and out at the other, each being touched by the bishop on his cheek as he went by. If they lagged, the bishop clapped his hands impatiently, and the schoolmaster drove them through faster. When there were no more to come, the women and little girls, be it observed, coming in for no share of this benediction, the priest took off his vestments and laid them in a heap upon the altar, the deacon distributed a basketful of blessed cakes among the poor of the congregation, and the bishop walked down the nave, eating a cake and giving a bit here and there to the best-dressed cops as he went along. So ended this interesting and curious service, which I have described thus minutely for the reason that it represents, with probably but little change, the earliest ceremonial of Christian worship in Egypt. Before leaving we asked permission to look at the books from which the service had been read. They were all very old and dilapidated. The New Testament, however, was in better condition than the rest, and was beautifully written upon vellum in red and black ink. The Coptic, of course, looks like Greek to the eyes of the uninitiated, but some of the illuminated capitals struck us as bearing a marked resemblance to certain of the more familiar hieroglyphic characters. While we were examining the books, the bishop sent his servant to invite us to pay him a visit. We accordingly followed the man up an outer flight of wooden steps at one corner of the courtyard, and were shown into a large room built partly over the church. Here we found the bishop, handsome, plump, dignified with soft brown eyes and a slightly grizzled beard, seated cross-legged on a divan and smoking his shabuque. On a table in the middle of the room stood two or three blue and white bottles of oriental porcelain. The windows, which were satchelous and very large, looked over to Karnak. The sparrows flew in and out as they listed. The bishop received us very amiably, and the proceedings opened as usual with pipes and coffee. The conversation which followed consisted chiefly of questions on our part and of answers on his. We asked the extent of his diocese and learned that it reached from Aswan on the south to Kenna on the north. The revenue of the sea, he said, was wholly derived from endowments in land. He estimated the number of cops in Luxor at two thousand, being two-thirds of the entire population. The church was built and decorated in the time of his predecessor. He had himself been bishop here for rather more than four years. We then spoke of the service we had just witnessed and of the books we had seen. I showed him my prayer-book which he examined with much curiosity. I explained the differences indicated by the black and the rubricated matter, and pointed out the parts that were sung. He was, however, more interested in the outside than in the contents, and tapped the binding once or twice to see if it were leather or wood. As for the gilt corners and clasp, he undoubtedly took them for solid gold. The conversation next turned upon Coptic, the idol-man asking him if he believed it to be the tongue actually spoken by the ancient Egyptians. To this he replied, Yes, undoubtedly. What else should it be? The idol-man hereupon suggested that it seemed him from what he had just seen of the church books as if it might be a corrupt form of Byzantine Greek. The bishop shook his head. The Coptic is a distinct language, he said. Eight Greek letters were added to the Coptic alphabet upon the introduction of Christianity into Egypt, and since that time many Greek words have been imported into the Coptic vocabulary. But the main body of the tongue is Coptic, purely, and it has no radical affinity whatever with the Greek. This was the longest speech we heard him make, and he delivered it with some emphasis. I then asked him if the Coptic was in all respects a dead language, to which he replied that many Coptic words, such as the names of the months and of certain festivals, were still in daily use. This, however, was not quite what I meant, so I put the question in another form, and asked if he thought any fragments of the tongue yet survived among the peasantry. He pondered a moment before replying. That, he said, is a question to which it is difficult to give a precise answer, but I think you might yet find, in some of the remote villages, an old man here and there who would understand it a little. I thought this a very interesting reply to a very interesting question. After sitting about half an hour we rose and took leave. The bishop shook hands with us all around, and, but that we protested against it, would have accompanied us to the head of the stairs. This interview was altogether very pleasant. The Cops are said to be sullen in manner, and so bigoted that even a Muslim is less an object of dislike to him than a Christian of any other denomination. However this may be, we saw nothing of it. We experienced, on the contrary, many acts of civility from the Cops with whom we were brought into communication. No traveler in Egypt should, I think, omit being present at a service in a Coptic church. Our Coptic church is now the only place in which one may hear the last utterances of that far-offed race, with whose pursuits and pleasures the tomb paintings make us so familiar. We know that great changes have come over the language since it was spoken by Romases the Great and written by Pentar. We know that the Coptic of today bears to the Egyptian of the pharaohs some such resemblance, perhaps, as the English of Macaulay bears to the English of Chaucer. But it is, at bottom, the tongue of old Egypt, and it is something to hear the last lingering echoes of that ancient speech read by the undoubted descendants of the Egyptian people. In another fifty years or so the Coptic will in all probability be superseded by the Arabic in the services of this church, and then the very tradition of its pronunciation will be lost. The Cops themselves, it is said, are fast going over to the dominant faith. Just by the time our own descendants are counting the two thousandth anniversary of the Christian era, both Cops and Coptic will be extinct in Egypt. A day or two after this we drop down to Karnak, where we remain till the end of the week, and on the following Sunday we resumed our downward voyage. If the universe of literature was unconditioned and the present book was independent of time and space, I would write another chapter here about Karnak. But Karnak, to be fairly dealt by, would ask not a chapter but a volume. So having already told something of the impression first made upon us by that wilderness of wonders, I will say no more. End of Section 66. A thousand miles up the Nile, Section 67. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 22. Abidus and Cairo, Part 1. Our last weeks on the Nile went by like one long lazy summer's day. Events now were few. We had outstayed all our fellow travellers. Even the faithful Bagstones had long since vanished northwards, and the Filet was the last Dahabiya of the year. Of the great sides of the river we had only Abidus and Benihassan left to sea, while for minor excursions, daily walks, and explorations by the way, we had little energy left. For the thermometer was rising higher and the Nile was falling lower every day, and we should have been more than mortal if we had not felt the languid influences of the glowing Egyptian spring. The natives call it spring, but to our northern fancy it is spring, summer, and autumn in one. Of the splendour of the skies, of the lavish bounty of the soil at this season, only those who have lingered late in the land can form any conception. There is a breath of repose now about the landscape which it has never worn before. The winter green of the palms is fading fast. The harvests are ripening, the pigeons are pairing, the time of the singing of birds is come. There is just enough south wind most days to keep the boat straight and the sails from flapping. The heat is great, yet it is a heat which, up to a certain point, one can enjoy. The men ply their oars by night and sleep under their benches, or croon old songs, until stories among themselves by day. But for the thin canopy of smoke that hangs over the villages, one would fancy now that those clusters of mud huts were all deserted. What a human being is to be seen on the banks when the sun is high. The buffaloes stand up to their necks in the shallows. The donkeys huddle together wherever there is shade. The very dogs have given up barking and lie asleep under the walls. The whole face of the country, and even of the Nile, is wonderfully changed since we first passed this way. The land, then newly squared off like a gigantic chessboard and intersected by thousands of little channels, is now one sea of yellowing grain. The river has become a labyrinth of sandbanks, some large, some small, some just beginning to thrust their heads above water, others so long that they divide the river for a mile or more at a stretch. Rais Hassan spends half his life at the prow, pulling for shadows. And when we thread our way down one of these sandy straits, it is for all the world like a bit of the Suez Canal. The banks, too, are twice as steep as they were when we went up. The lentil patches, which then blossomed on the slopes next the water's edge, now lie far back on the top of a steep brown ridge at the foot of which stretches a moist flat planted with watermelons. Each melon plant is protected from the sun by a tiny gable roof of palm thatch. Meanwhile, the river, being low in the banks high, we unfortunate's benefit scarcely at all by the faint breezes that now and then ruffled the barley. Day by day the thermometer, which hangs in the coolest corner of the saloon, creeps up higher and higher, working its way by degrees to above ninety-nine degrees, but never succeeding in getting quite up to one hundred. We, however, living in semi-darkness with closed jellices and wet sails hung round about the sides of the Dahabia, and wet towels hung up in our cabins, find ninety-nine degrees quite warm enough to be pleasant. The upper deck is, of course, well deluged several times a day, but even so it is difficult to keep the timbers from starting. Meanwhile, El and the idle man devote their leisure to killing flies, keeping the towels wet and sprinkling the floors. Our progress all this time is of the slowest. The men cannot row by day, and at night the sandbanks so hedge us in with dangers that the only possible way by which we can make a few miles between sunset and sunrise is by sheer hard punting. Now and then we come to a clear channel, and sometimes we get an hour or two of sweet south breeze, but these flashes of good luck are few and far between. In such wise and in such a temperature we found ourselves becalmed one morning within six miles of Dendera. Not even El could be induced to take a six-mile donkey-ride that day in the sun. The rider, however, ordered out her sketching tent and paid a last visit to the temple, which, seen among the ripening splendor of miles of barley, looked gloomier and grander and more solitary than ever. Two or three days later we came within reach of Abidas. Our proper course would have been to push on to Beliana, which is one of the recognized starting-points for Abidas. At an unlucky sand-bank barred the way, so we moored instead at Samada, a village about two miles nearer to the southward. Here our Drago-man requisitioned the inhabitants for donkeys. As it happened the harvest had begun in the neighborhood and all the beasts of burden were at work, so that it was near mid-day before we succeeded in getting together the three or four wretched little brutes, with which we finally started. Not one of these steeds had ever before carried a rider. We had a frightful time with them. My donkey bolted about every five minutes. Elves snarled like a camel and showed its teeth like a dog. The idle man, bent on flattening its rider, laid down and rolled at short intervals. In this exciting fashion we somehow or another accomplished the seven miles that separate Samada from Abidas. Skirting some palm groves and crossing the dry bed of a canal, we came out upon a vast plain, level as a lake, islanded here and there with villages, and presenting one undulating surface of bearded corn. This plain, the plain of ancient thinness, runs parallel with a nile, like the plain of thieves, and is bound to the westward by a range of flat-topped mountains. The distance between the river and the mountains, however, is here much greater than at thieves, being full six miles, while to north and south the view ends only with the horizon. Our way lies, at first, by a bridal track through the thick of the barley, then falls into the belliana road, a raised causeway in banks some twenty feet above the plain. Along this road the country folk are coming and going. In the cleared spaces where the maze has been cut, little encampments of straw huts have sprung up. Yonder, steering their way by unseen paths, go strings of camels. Their gawky necks and humped backs undulating above the surface of the corn, like galleys with fantastic prowls upon a sea of rippling green. The pigeons fly in great clouds from village to village. The larks are singing and circling madly in the clear depths overhead. The bee-eaters flash like live emeralds across our path. The hoopos strut by the wayside. At rather more than half way across the plain we come into the midst of the harvest. Here the brown reapers, bare-legged and naked to the waste, are at work with their sickles, just as they are pictured in the tomb of tea. The women and children follow, gleaning at the heels of those who bind the sheaves. The shake in his black robe and scarlet slippers rides to and fro upon his ass, like boas among his people. As the sheaves are bound up the camels carry them homeward. A camel-load is fourteen sheaves, seven to each side of the hump. A little farther and the oxen, yoked two and two, are plowing up the stubble. In a day or two the land will be sown with millet, indigo, or cotton to be gathered in once more before the coming of the inundation. Meanwhile as the plain lengthens behind us and the distance grows less between ourselves and the mountains, we see a line of huge irregular mounds reaching for apparently a couple of miles or more along the foot of the cliffs. From afar off the mounds look as if crowned by majestic ruins, but as we draw nearer these outlines resolve themselves into the village of Arabat el-Madfuna, which stands upon part of the mounds of Abidas. And now we come to the end of the cultivated plain, that strange line of demarcation where the inundation stops and the desert begins. Of actual desert, however, there is here but a narrow strip, forming a first step as it were above the alluvial plain. Next comes the artificial platform about a quarter of a mile in depth on which stands the modern village, and next again towering up sheer and steep the great wall of limestone precipice. The village is extensive, and the houses built in a rustic arabesque tell of a well-to-do population. Most gateways ornamented with black, white, and red bricks, windows of churned latticework, and pigeon-towers in courses of pots and bricks give a singular picturesqueness to the place, while the slope down to the desert is covered with shrubberies and palms. Below these hanging gardens on the edge of the desert lies the cut corn in piles of sheaves. Here the camels are lying down to be unladen, yonder the oxen are already treading out the grain, or chopping the straw by means of a curious sledge-like machine set with revolving rows of circular knives. Meanwhile, fluttering from heap to heap, settling on the sheaves, feeding unmolested in the very midst of the threshing floors, strutting all over the margin of the desert, trailing their wings, ruffling their plumes, cooing, curtsying, kissing, courting, filling the air with sweet sounds and setting the whole lovely idol to a pastoral symphony of their own composing are thousands and tens of thousands of pigeons. Now our path turns aside and we thread our way among the houses, noticing here a sculptured block built into a mud-wall, yonder beside a dried-up well a broken alabaster sarcophagus, farther on a granite column still erect in the midst of a palm garden. And now the village being left behind we find ourselves at the foot of a great hill of newly excavated rubbish, from the top of which we presently look down into a kind of crater and see the great temple of Abidas at our feet. It was now nearly three o'clock, so having seen what we could in the time and having before us a long ride through a strange country, we left again at six. I will not presume to describe the temples of Abidas, one of which is so ruined as to be almost unintelligible, and the other so singularly planned and so obscure in its general purport as to be a standing puzzle to archaeologists, after a short visit of three hours. Enough if I sketch briefly what I saw but cursorily. Buried as it is, Abidas, even under its mounds, is a place of profound historical interest. At a time so remote that it precedes all written record of Egyptian story, there existed a little way to the northward of this site, a city called Teni. We know not to what aboriginal community of prehistoric Egypt this city belonged, but here presumably the men of Qem built their first temple, evolved their first notions of art, and groped their way to an alphabet which in its origin was probably a mere picture-writing, like the picture-writing of Mexico. Hence too came a man named Mina, whose cartouche from immemorial time has stood first in the long list of Egyptian pharaohs. Of Mina a shadowy figure hovering on the borderland of history and tradition, we know only that he was the first primitive chieftain who took the title of King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and that he went northward and founded Memphis. Not however till after some centuries was the seat of government removed to the new city. Teni, the supposed burial-place of Osiris, then lost its political importance, but continued to be for long ages the holy city of Egypt. In the meanwhile Abidus had sprung up close to Teni. Abidus, however, though an important city, was never the capital of Egypt. The seat of power shifted strangely with different dynasties, being established now in the Delta, now at Thebes, now at Elephantine, but having once departed from the site which, by reason of its central position, and the unbounded fertility of its neighborhood, was above all others best fitted to play this great part in the history of the country, it never again returned to the point from which it had started. That point, however, was unquestionably the center from which the great Egyptian people departed upon its wonderful career. Here was the nursery of its strength. Hence it derived its proud title to an unmixed Atokhthonus descent. For no greater proof of the native origin of the race can be adduced than the position which their first city occupies upon the map of Egypt. That any tribe of colonists should have made straight for the heart of the country, and there have established themselves in the midst of barbarous and probably hostile aborigines, is evidently out of the question. It is, on the other hand, equally clear that if Egypt had been colonized from Asia or Ethiopia, the strangers would, on the one hand, have founded their earliest settlement in the neighborhood of the Isthmiths, or on the other, have halted first among the well-watered plains of Nubia. But the Egyptians started from the fertile heart of their own mother country and began by being great at home. Abidas and Teni, planted on the same platform of desert, were probably united at one time by a straggling suburb inhabited by the embalmers and other tradesfolk concerned in the business of death and burial. A chain of mounds excavated only where the temples were situated now stands to us for the famous city of Abidas. An ancient crude brick enclosure in an artificial tumulus marked the site of Teni. The temples in the tumulus divided by the now-exhausted necropolis are about as distant from one another as Madinid Habu and the Ramasiyam. There must have been many older temples at Abidas than these which we now see, one of which was built by Sedi I and the other by Ramasis II. Or possibly, as in so many instances, the more ancient buildings were pulled down and rebuilt. Be this as it may, the temple of Sedi, as regards its sculpture decorations, is one of the most beautiful of Egyptian ruins. And as regards its plan, is one of the most singular. A row of square limestone piers, which must once have supported an architrave, are now all the remains of the façade. Immediately behind these comes a portico of twenty-four columns leading by seven entrances to a hall of thirty-six columns. This hall, again, is open into seven parallel sanctuaries, behind which lie another hall of columns and a number of small chambers. Adjoining this block, however, and leading from it by doorways at the southern end of the Great Hall, come several more halls and chambers connected by corridors and conducting, apparently, to more chambers not yet excavated. All these piers, columns, halls, and passages, and all the seven sanctuaries, are most delicately sculptured and brilliantly colored. There is so far a family resemblance between temples of the same style and period that after a little experience one can generally guess before crossing the threshold of a fresh building what one is likely to see in the way of sculptures within. But almost every subject in the temple of Sedi at Abidus is new and strange. All the gods of the Egyptian pantheon seem to have been worshiped here, and to have had each his separate shrine. The walls are covered with paintings of these shrines and their occupants, while before each the king is represented performing some act of adoration. A huge blue frog, a grey hound, a double-headed goose, a human-bodied creature with a nilometer for its head, and many more that I can now remember are thus depicted. The royal offerings, too, though incense and necklaces and pectoral ornaments abound, are for the most part of a kind we have not seen before. In one place the king presents to Isis a column with four capitals, having on the top, capital, a globe, and two aps, surmounted by a pair of ostrich feathers. CHAPTER XXII. The center sanctuary of the seven appears to be dedicated to Kim, who seems to be here as in the great temple of Sedi at Karnak, the presiding divinity. In this principal sanctuary, which is resplendent with color and marvelous preservation, we especially observe a portrait of Ramesses II in the act of opening a door of a shrine by means of a golden key, formed like a human hand and arm. The lock seems to consist of a number of bolts of unequal length, each of which is pushed back in turn by means of the forefinger of the little hand. This doubtless gives a correct representation of the kind of locks in use at that time. It was in a corridor opening out from the great hall in this temple that Mariette discovered that precious sculpture known as the new tablet of Abidas. In this tableau, Sedi I and Ramesses II are seen, the one offering incense, the other reciting a hymn of praise, to the names of seventy-six pharaohs beginning with Mina and ending with Sedi himself. To our great disappointment, though one cannot but acquiesce in the necessity for precaution, we found the entrance to this corridor closed and molded up. A ragged old Arab who haunts the temple and the character of custode told us that the tablet could now only be seen by special permission. We seemed to have been here about half an hour when the guide came to warn us of approaching evening. We had yet the sight and the great tumulus of Teni to see, the tumulus being distant about twenty minutes fried. The guide shook his head, but we insisted on going. The afternoon had darkened over, and for the first time in many months a gathering canopy of clouds shut out the glory of sunset. We, however, mounted our donkeys and rode northwards. With better beast we might have perhaps gained our end. As it was, seeing that it grew darker every moment, we presently gave in, and instead of trying to push on farther, contented ourselves with climbing a high mound which commanded the view towards Teni. The clouds by this time were fast closing round, and waves of shadows were creeping over the plain. To our left rose the near-mountain barrier, dusk and lowering, to our right stretched the misty corn-flats, at our feet, all hillots and open graves, lay the desolate necropolis. Beyond the palms that fringed the edge of the desert, beyond a dark streak that marked the sight of Teni, rose, purple and shadow against the twilight, a steep and solitary hill. This hill, called by the natives Kames Sultan or the Mound of the King, was the tumulus we so desired to see. Viewed from a distance, and by so uncertain a light, it looked exactly like a volcanic cone of perhaps a couple of hundred feet in height. It is, however, wholly artificial, and consists of a mass of graves heaped one above another in historical strata. Each layer, as it were, the record of an era, the whole a kind of human coral reef built up from age to age with the ashes of generations. For some years past the Egyptian government had been gradually excavating this extraordinary mound. The lower it was opened, the more ancient were its contents. So steadily retrogressive indeed were the interments that it seemed as if the spade of the digger might possibly strike tombs of the First Dynasty, and so restore to light relics of men who lived in the age of Mina. According to Plutarch, wrote Mariette, wealthy Egyptians came from all parts of Egypt to be buried at Abidas, in order that their bones might rest near Osiris. Very probably the tombs of Kames Sultan belong to those personages mentioned by Plutarch. Nor is this the only interesting attachment to the Mound of Kames Sultan. The famous tomb of Osiris cannot be far distant, and certain indications lead us to think that it is excavated in precisely that foundation of rock, which serves as the nucleus of this mound. Thus the persons buried in Kames Sultan lay as near as possible to the divine tomb. The works now in progress at this point have therefore a twofold interest. They may yield tombs more and more ancient, tombs even of the First Dynasty, and some day or other they may discover to us the hitherto unknown and unknown entrance to the tomb of the God. I bitterly regretted at the time that I could not at least ride to the foot of Kames Sultan, but I think now that I prefer to remember it as I saw it from afar off, clothed with mystery in the gloom of that dusky evening. There was a heavy silence in the air and a melancholy as of the burden of ages. The tumbled hillocks looked like a ghastly sea and beyond the verge of the desert it was already night. Presently from among the grave pits there crept towards us a slowly moving cloud. As it drew nearer, soft, filmy, shifting, unreal, it proved to be the dust raised by an immense flock of sheep. On they came a brown compact mass, their shepherds showing dimly now and then, through openings in the cloud. The last pale gleam from above caught them for a moment ere they melted ghost-like into the murky plain. Then we went down ourselves and threaded the track between the mounds and the valley. Palms and houses loomed vaguely out of the dark and a caravan of camels stalking by with swift and noiseless footfall looked like shadows projected on a background of mist. As the night deepened the air became stifling. There were no stars and we could scarcely see a yard before us. Crawling slowly along the steep causeway we felt but could distinguish nothing of the plain stretching away on either side. Meanwhile the frogs croaked furiously and our donkeys stumbled at every step. When at length we drew near Samadha it was close upon ten o'clock and Rai's Hassan had just started with men and torches to meet us. Next morning early we once again passed Gerga with its ruined mosque and still unfallen column and about noonday moored at a place called Asirat where we paid a visit to a native gentleman, one Ahmed Abu Ratab Agha to whom we carried letters of introduction. Ratab Agha owns large estates in this province, is great in horse flesh, and lives in patriarchal fashion surrounded by a numerous clan of kinsfolk and dependents. His residence at Asirat consists of a cluster of three or four large houses, a score or so of pigeon towers, an extensive garden, stabling, exercising ground and a large courtyard, the hole enclosed by a wall of circuit and entered by a fine arabesque gateway. He received us in a logia of lattice work overlooking the courtyard and had three of his finest horses, a gray, a bay, and a chestnut, brought out for us to admire. They were just such horses as Velazquez loved to paint, thick in the neck, small in the head, solid in the barrel with wavy mains and long silky tails, set high and standing off straight in true arab fashion. We doubted, however, that they were altogether pure sang. They looked wonderfully picturesque with their gold embroidered saddle-cloths, peaked saddles covered with crimson, green, and blue velvet, long shovel stirrups and tasseled headgear. The Agha's brother and nephews put them through their paces. They knelt to be mounted, lay down and died at the word of command, dashed from perfect immobility into a furious gallop, and when at full a speed, stopped short, flung themselves back upon their haunches and stood like horses of stone. We were told that our host had a hundred such standing in his stables. Pipes, coffee, and an endless secession of different kinds of sherbits went round all the time our visit lasted, and in the course of conversation we learned that not only the wages of agricultural laborers, but even part of the taxes to the kadeev are here paid in corn. Before leaving, El, the little lady and the rider, were conducted to the harem and introduced to the ladies of the establishment. We found them in a separate building with a separate courtyard, living after the usual dreary way of eastern women, with apparently no kind of occupation and not even a garden to walk in. The August principal wife, I believe he had but, too, was a beautiful woman with auburn hair, soft brown eyes, and a lovely complexion. She received us on the threshold, led us into a saloon surrounded by a divan, and with some pride showed us her five children. The eldest was a graceful girl of thirteen, the youngest a little fellow of four. Mother and daughter were dressed alike, in black robes embroidered with silver, pink velvet slippers on bare feet, silver bracelets and anklets, and full pink Turkish trousers. They wore their hair cut straight across the brow, plaited in long tails behind and dressed with coins and pendants, while from the back of the head there hung a veil of thin black gauze, also embroidered with silver. Another lady, whom we took for the second wife and who was extremely plain, had still richer and more massive ornaments, but seemed to hold an inferior position in the harine. There were perhaps a dozen women and girls in all, two of whom were black. One of the little boys had been ill all his short life and looked as if he could not last many more months. The poor mother implored us to prescribe for him. It was in vain to tell her that we knew nothing of the nature of his disease and had no skill to cure it. She still untreated and would take no refusal, so in pity we sent her some harmless medicines. We had little opportunity of observing domestic life in Egypt. El visited some of the vice regal harems in Cairo and brought away on each occasion the same impression of dreariness. A little embroidery, a few musical toys of Geneva manufacture, a daily drive on the Shubra Road, pipes, cigarettes, sweetmeats, jewelry, and gossip fill up the aimless days of most Egyptian ladies of rank. There are, however, some who take in active interest in politics, and in Cairo and Alexandria the opera boxes of the Kediv and the great Pashas are nightly occupied by ladies. But it is not by the daily life of the wives of princes and nobles, but by the life of the lesser gentry in upper middle class that a domestic system should be judged. These ladies of Asirat had no London-built brawn, no shrubber road, no opera. They were absolutely without mental resources, and they were even without the means of taking air and exercise. One could see that time hung heavy on their hands, and that they took but a feeble interest in the things around them. The harems' stairs were dirty, the rooms were untidy, the general aspect of the place was slatternly and neglected. As for the inmates, though all good nature and gentleness, their faces bore the expression of people who are habitually bored. At Luxor, El and the writer paid a visit to the wife of an intelligent and gentlemanly Arab, son of the late governor of that place. This was a middle-class harem. The couple were young and not rich. They occupied a small house, which commanded no view and had no garden. Their little courtyard was given up to the poultry, their tiny terrace above was less than twelve feet square, and they were surrounded on all sides by houses. Yet in this stifling prison the young wife lived apparently contented from year's end to year's end. She literally never went out. As a child she had no doubt enjoyed some kind of liberty, but as a marriageable girl and as a bride she was as much a prisoner as a bird in a cage. One in bread and Luxor she had never seen karnak, yet karnak is only two miles distant. We asked her if she would like to go there with us, but she laughed and shook her head. She was incapable even of curiosity. It seemed to us that the wives of the fellow hen were in truth the happiest women in Egypt. They work hard and are bitterly poor, but they have the free use of their limbs, and they at least know the fresh air, the sunshine, and the open fields. When we left Asirat there still lay three hundred and thirty-five miles between us and Cairo. From this time the navigation of the Nile became every day more difficult. The Dahabia, too, got heated through and through so that not even sluicing and swabbing availed to keep down the temperature. At night when we went to our sleeping cabins the timbers alongside of our berths were as hot to the hand as a screen in front of a great fire. Our crew, though to the manner born, suffered even more than ourselves, and El at this time had generally a case of sunstroke on her hands. One by one we passed the places we had seen on our way up. Siyut, Montfalut, Gebu Abu Faeda, Rhoda, Minya. After all we did not see Benihassan. The day we reached that part of the river a furious sandstorm was raging, such a storm that even the rider was daunted. Three days later we took the rail at Beba and went on to Cairo, leaving the filet to follow as fast as wind and weather might permit. We were so wedded by this time to Dahabia life that we felt lost at first in the big rooms at Shepherd's Hotel, and altogether bewildered in the crowded streets. Yet here was Cairo, more picturesque, more beautiful than ever. Here were the same merchants squatting on the same carpets and smoking the same pipes, in the Tunis Bazaar. Here was the same old cake-seller still ensconced in the same doorway in the musky. Here were the same jewelers selling bracelets in the Khan Kalili, the same money-changers sitting behind their little tables at the corners of the streets, the same veiled ladies riding on donkeys and driving in carriages, the same hurrying funerals and noisy weddings, the same odd cries and motley costumes and unaccustomed trades. Nothing was changed. We soon dropped back into the old life of sightseeing and shopping, buying rugs and silks and silver ornaments and old embroideries and Turkish slippers and all sorts of antique and pretty trifles, going from Mohammedan mosque to rare old Coptic churches, dropping in for an hour or two most afternoons at the Bulak Museum and generally ending the day's work with a drive on the Shubra Road or a stroll round the Esbakiya Gardens. Abidus and Cairo Part 3 The Maled and Nabi, or Festival of the Birth of the Prophet, was being held at this time in attractive waste ground along the road to old Cairo. Here in some twenty or thirty large open tents, ranged in a circle, there were readings of the Quran and meetings of dervishes going on by day and night without intermission for nearly a fortnight. After dark, when the tents were all ablaze with lighted chandeliers, and the dervishes were howling and leaping and fireworks were being let off from an illuminated platform in the middle of the area, the scene was extraordinary. All Cairo used to be there on footer and carriages between eight o'clock and midnight every evening, the veiled ladies of the Kediv's harem and their miniature roms being foremost among the spectators. The Maled and Nabi ends with the performance of the dosha, when the shake of the Sadiya dervishes rides over a road of prostrate fanatics. El and the rider witness this sight from the tent of the governor of Cairo. Drunk with opium, fasting and praying, rolling their heads and foaming at the mouth, some hundreds of wretched creatures lay down in the road packed as close as paving-stones, and were walked and ridden over before our eyes. The standard-bearers came first, then a priest reading the Quran aloud, then the shake on his white Arab supported on either side by barefooted priests. The beautiful horse trod with evident reluctance, and as lightly and swiftly as possible on the human causeway under his hoofs. The Mohammedans aver that no one is injured, or even bruised, on this holy occasion, but I saw some men carried away in convulsions who looked as if they would never walk again. It is difficult to say but a few inadequate words of a place about which an instructive volume might be written, yet to pass the Boulak Museum in silence is impossible. This famous collection is due, in the first instance, to the liberality of the late Kiddiv and the labors of Mariette. With the exception of Mohammed Ali, who excavated the Temple of Dendera, no previous viceroy of Egypt had ever interested himself in the archaeology of the country. Those who cared for such rubbish as encumbered the soil or lay hidden beneath the sands of the desert were free to take it, and no favour was more frequently asked or more readily granted than permission to dig for antiqueas. Hence the Egyptian wealth of our museums, hence the numerous private collections dispersed throughout Europe. Ishmael Pasha, however, put an end to that wholesale pillage, and for the first time since ever mummy was sold for balsam or for bric-a-brac, it became illegal to export antiquities. Thus for the first time Egypt began to possess a national collection. Youngest of great museums, the Boulak Collection is the wealthiest in the world in portrait statues of private individuals, in funerary tablets, in amulets, and in personal relics of the ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley. It is necessarily less rich in such colossal statues as fill the great galleries of the British Museum, the Turin Museum, and the Louvre. These being above ground in comparatively few in number were for the most part seized upon long since, and transported to Europe. The Boulak statues are the product of the tombs. The famous wooden shake about which so much has been written, the magnificent diorite statue of Kafra, or Kefron, the builder of the second pyramid, the two marvelous sitting statues of Prince Rahotep and Princess Neferet are all portraits, and, like their tombs, were executed during the lifetime of the persons represented. Crossing the threshold of the great vestibule, one is surrounded by a host of these extraordinary figures, erect, colored, clothed, all but in motion. It is like entering the crowded anti-room of a royal palace in the time of the ancient empire. The greater number of the Boulak portrait statues are sculptured in what is called the hieratic attitude. That is, with the left arm down and pressed close to the body, the left hand holding a roll of papyrus, the right leg advanced and the right hand raised, as grasping the walking staff. It occurred to me that there might be a deeper significance than at first sight appears in this conventional attitude, and that it perhaps suggests the moment of resurrection, when the deceased holding fast by his copy of the Book of the Dead. Walks forth from his tomb into the light of life eternal. Of all the statues here, one may say indeed of all known Egyptian statues, those of Prince Rahotep and Princess Neferet are the most wonderful. They are probably the oldest portrait statues in the world. They come from a tomb of the Third Dynasty and are contemporary with Snefru, a king who reigned before the time of Khufu and Kafra. That is to say, these people who sit before us side by side, colored to the life fresh and glowing as the day when they gave the artist his last sitting, lived at a time when the great pyramids of Giza were not yet built, and at a date which is variously calculated as from about sixty-three hundred to four thousand years before the present day. The princess wears her hair precisely as it is still worn in Nubia, and her necklace of kabochan drops is of a pattern much favored by the modern Guwazi. The eyes of both statues are inserted. The eyeball which is set in an islet of bronze is made of opaque white quartz with an iris of rock crystal enclosing a pupil of some kind of brilliant metal. This treatment, of which there are one or two other instances extant, gives to the eyes a look of intelligence that is almost appalling. There is a play of light within the orb and apparently a living moisture upon the surface which has never been approached by the most skillfully made glass eyes of modern manufacture. Of the jewels of Queen Ahotep, of the superb series of engraved scaraby, of the rings, amulets, and toilette ornaments of the vases and bronze, silver, alabaster, and porcelain, of the libation tables, the woven stuffs, the terracottas, the artist's models, the lamps, the silver boats, the weapons, the papyri, the thousand and one curious personal relics and articles of domestic use which are brought together within these walls, I have no space to tell. Except the collection of Pompey and relics and Naples there is nothing elsewhere to compare with the collection at Bulak, and the villas of Pompey have yielded no such gems and jewels as the tombs of ancient Egypt. It is not too much to say that if these dead and mummied people could come back to earth, the priest would here find all the gods of his pantheon, the king his scepter, the queen her crown jewels, the scribe his pallet, the soldier his arms, the workmen his tools, the barber his razors, the husband men his hoe, the housewife her broom, the child his toys, the beauty her combs and coal bottles and mirrors. The furniture of the house is here as well as the furniture of the tomb. Here too is the broken system buried with the dead in token of the grief of the living. Waiting the construction of a more suitable edifice the present building gives temporary shelter to the collection. In the meanwhile, if there was nothing else to tempt the traveller to Cairo, the Bulak Museum would alone be worth the journey from Europe. The first excursion one makes on returning to Cairo the last one one makes before leaving is to Giza. It is impossible to get tired of the pyramids. Here El and the riders spent their last day with the happy couple. We left Cairo early and met all the market folk coming in from the country, donkeys and carts laden with green stuff and veiled women with towers of baskets on their heads. The Kediv's new palace was swarming already with masons and files of camels were bringing limestone blocks for the builders. Next comes the open corn plain, part yellow, part green, the long straight road bordered with acacias, beyond all the desert platform and the pyramids, half in light, half in grayish-green shadow against the horizon. I could never understand why it is that the second pyramid, though it is smaller and farther off, looks from this point of view bigger than the first. Later on the brown fellow-hin, knee-deep in purple blossom, are cutting the clover. The camels carry it away. The goats and buffaloes feed in the clearings. Then comes the halfway tomb nestled in greenery where men and horses stay to drink, and soon we are skirting a great backwater which reflects the pyramids like a mirror. Villages, chadoops, herds and flocks, tracts of palms, corn flats, and spaces of rich dark fallow now succeed each other. And then once more comes the sandy slope and the cavernous ridge of ancient yellow rock and the great pyramid with its shadow side towards us, darkening the light of day. Neither El nor the rider went inside the great pyramid. The idle man did so this day and El's made on another occasion, and both reported of the place as so stifling within, so foul under foot, and so fatiguing, that somehow we each time put it off and ended by missing it. The ascent is extremely easy. Rugged and huge as are the blocks, there is scarcely one upon which it is not possible to find a halfway rest for the toe of one's boot, so as to divide the distance. With the help of three Arabs nothing can well be less fatiguing. As for the men they are helpful and courteous, and as clever as possible, and coax one on from block to block in all the local languages of Europe. Pasienza, signora. Allay doucement, all serene, we halfway now. Dem halvenveg, froline. Ne vous présé pas, mademoiselle. Civa sano, valentano, six step more and echo la cima. You should add the other half of the proverb, Amici, said I. Civa forte, va alla morte. My Arabs had never heard this before and were delighted with it. They repeated it again and again and committed it to memory with great satisfaction. I asked them why they did not cut steps in the blocks, so as to make the ascent easier for ladies. The answer was ready and honest. No, no, mademoiselle. Arab very stupid to do that. If Arab makes good steps, Hawaji goes up alone. No more want Arab man to help him up, and Arab man earned no more dollars. They offered to sing Yankee Doodle when we reached the top. Then, finding we were English, shouted, God save the Queen, and told us that the Prince of Wales had given forty pounds to the Pyramid Arabs when he came here with the Princess two years before, which, however, we took the liberty to doubt. The space on the top of the Great Pyramid is said to be thirty feet square. It is not, as I had expected, a level platform. Some blocks of the next tier remain, and two or three of the tier next above that, so making pleasant seats and shady corners. What struck us most on reaching the top was the startling nearness to all appearance of the second Pyramid. It seemed to rise up beside us like a mountain, yet so close that I fancied I could almost touch it by putting out my hand. Every detail of the surface, every crack and party-colored stain in the shining stucco that yet clings about the apex, was distinctly visible. The view from this place is immense. The country is so flat, the atmosphere so clear, the standpoint so isolated, that one really sees more and sees farther than from many a mountain summit of ten or twelve thousand feet. The ground lies, as it were, immediately under one, and the Great Necropolis is seen as in a ground plan. The effect must, I imagine, be exactly like the effect of a landscape seen from a balloon. Without ascending the Pyramid, it is certainly not possible to form a clear notion of the way in which this great burial-field is laid out. We see from this point how each royal Pyramid is surrounded by its quadrangle of lesser tombs, some in the form of small Pyramids, others partly rock-cut, partly built of massive slabs, like the roving-stones of the temples. We see how Kufu and Kafra and Mankara lay each under his mountain of stone, with his family and his nobles around him. We see the great causeway which moved Herodotus to such wonder, and along which the giant stones were brought. Recognizing how clearly the place is a great cemetery, one marvels at the ingenious theories which turn the Pyramids into astronomical observatories, and obtruse standards of measurement. They are the grandest graves in all the world, and they are nothing more. A little way to the southward from the midst of a sandy hollow rises the head of the Sphinx. Older than the Pyramids, older than history, the monster lies cushioned like a watch-dog, looking ever to the east as if for some dawn that has not yet risen. A depression in the sand, close by, marks the site of that strange monument, miscalled the Temple of the Sphinx. Farther away to the west on the highest slope of this part of the desert platform stands the Pyramid of Mencara, my Sorenus. It has lost but five feet of its original height, and from this distance it looks quite perfect. Such set in a waste of desert are the main objects and the nearest objects on which arise first rest. As a whole the view is more long than wide, being bounded to the westward by the Libyan range and to the eastward by the Makatum Hills. At the foot of those yellow hills, divided from us by the cultivated plain across which we have just driven, lies Cairo, all glittering domes have seen through a sunlit haze. Overlooking the fairy city stands the mosque of the Citadel, its massed light minarets piercing the clearer atmosphere. Far to the northward, traversing reach after reach of shadowy palm groves, the eye loses itself in the dim and fertile distances of the delta. To the west and south, all is desert. It begins here at our feet, a rolling wilderness of valleys and slopes and rivers and seas of sand, broken here and there by abrupt ridges of rock and mounds of ruined masonry and open graves. A silver line skirts the edge of this dead world and vanishes southward in the sun mist that shimmers on the farthest horizon. To the left of that silver line we see the quarried cliffs of Tura, marble white, opposite Tura the plume palms of Memphis. On the desert platform above, clear though faint, the pyramids of Abusir and Sakara and Dashur. Every stage of the pyramid of Osenefus, banded in light and shade is plain to see. So is the dome-like summit of the great pyramid of Dashur. Even the brick ruined beside it, which we took for a black rock as we went up the river, and which looks like a black rock still, is perfectly visible. Farthest of them all, showing pale and sharp amid the palpitating blaze of noon, stands like an unfinished tower of Babel, the pyramid of Maydom. It is in this direction that our eyes turn oftenest, to the measureless desert in its mystery of light and silence, to the nile where it gleams out again and again till it melts at last into that faint, far distance beyond which lie Thebes and Filet and Abu Simbel. led by Dr. Heather Ambi, Carleton, Georgia, June 2007. End of Section 69. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Section 70. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Appendix I. A. McCallum Esquire to the Editor of the Times. This letter appeared in the Times of March 18, 1874. Sir, it may interest your readers to learn that at the south side of the great temple of Abu Simbel I found the entrance to a painted chamber rock cut, and measuring twenty-one feet, two and one half inches, by fourteen feet, eight inches, and twelve feet high to the spring of the arch, elaborately sculptured and painted in the best style of the best period of Egyptian art, bearing the portraits of Ramesses the Great and his cartouches, and in a state of the highest preservation. This chamber is preceded by the ruins of a vaulted atrium, in sun-dried brickwork, and adjoins the remains of what would appear to be a massive wall or pylon, which contains a staircase terminating in an arched doorway leading to the vaulted atrium before mentioned. The doorway of the painted chamber, the staircase and the arch, were all buried in sand and debris. The chamber appears to have been covered and lost sight of, since a very early period, being wholly free from mutilation and from the scribbling of travelers, ancient and modern. The staircase was not opened until the eighteenth, and the bones of a woman and child with two small, siniary urns were there discovered by a gentleman of our party buried in the sand. This was doubtless a subsequent interment. Whether this painted chamber is the inner sanctuary of a small temple or part of a tomb or only a speos, like the well-known grottoes at Ebram, is a question for future excavators to determine. I have the honor to be, sir, yours, et cetera, et cetera, Andrew McCallum, Corosco, Nubia, February 16th, 1874. END OF SECTION 70 A thousand miles up the Nile, Section 71. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. PENDICS II The Deities of Ancient Egypt consist of celestial, terrestrial, and infernal gods, and of many inferior personages either representatives of the greater gods or else attendants upon them. Most of the gods were connected with the sun and represented that luminary in its passage through the upper hemisphere or heaven and the lower hemisphere or Hades. To the deities of the solar cycle belonged the great gods of Thebes and Heliopolis. In the local worship of Egypt the deities were arranged in local triads. Thus, at Memphis, Ptah, his wife Mary M. Ptah, and their son Nefer Adam, formed a triad, in which was sometimes added the goddess Bast or Bubastus. At Abidus the local triad was Osiris, Isis, and Horus, with Nephthys. At Thebes, Amun-Ra or Amun, Mut, and Khans, with Neth. At Elephantine, Knef, Anuka, Sedi, and Haq. In most instances the names of the gods are Egyptian, thus Ptah meant the opener. Amun, the concealed, Ra, the sun, or day, Athor, the house of Horus, but some few, especially of later times, were introduced from Semitic sources as Baal or Baal, Astorata or Astart, Ken or Kian, Respu or Respeth. Besides the principal gods, several inferior or parhedro gods, sometimes personifications of the faculties, senses, and other objects, are introduced into the religious system, and genies, spirits, or personified souls of deities formed part of the same. At a period subsequent to their first introduction, the gods were divided into three orders. The first or highest comprised eight deities, who were different in the Memphian and Theban systems. They were supposed to have reigned over Egypt before the time of mortals. The eight gods of the first order at Memphis were One Ptah, Two Shoe, Three Tefnu, Four Seb, Five Nut, Six Osiris, Seven Isis and Horus, Eight Athor. Those of Thebes were One Amun Ra, Two Mentu, Three Atom, Four Shoe and Tefnu, Five Seb, Six Osiris, Seven Set and Nephis, Eight Horus and Athor. The gods of the second order were twelve in number, but the name of one only, and Egyptian Hercules, has been preserved. The third order is stated to have comprised Osiris, who, it will be seen, belong to the first order. Guide to the first and second Egyptian rooms, British Museum, S. Birch, 1874. The gods most commonly represented upon the monuments are Ptah, Canum, Ra, Amun Ra, Chem, Osiris, Nefer Atom or Tum, Thoth, Seb, Set, Cons, Horus, Mott, Neath, Isis, Nut, Athor and Bast. They are distinguished by the following attributes. Ptah, or Ptah, inform a mummy holding the emblem called by some the Neelometer, by others the emblem of stability. Called the Father of the Beginning, the Creator of the Yeg of the Sun and the Moon, Chief Deity of Memphis, Knef, Knoom, or Knufus, Ram-headed, called the Maker of Gods and Men, the Soul of the Gods, Chief Deity of Elephantine and the Cataracts, Ra, hawk-headed and crowned with the Sun-disk encircled by an asp, the Divine Disposer and Organizer of the World, adored throughout Egypt. Amun Ra, of human form, crowned with a flat-topped cap and two long straight plumes, clothed in the shanty, his flesh sometimes painted blue. There are various forms of this God. But he is mostly generally described as King of the Gods, Chief Deity of Thebes. Chem, of human form mummified, wears headdress of Amun Ra, his right hand uplifted, holding the flail. The God of Productiveness and Generation, Chief Deity of Chemnus or Ekmim, is identified in later times with Amun and called Amun Chem. Osiris, of human form mummified, crowned with a meter and holding the flail and crook, called the Good Being, the Lord above all, the One Lord, was the God of the lower world, Judge of the dead and Representative of the Sun below the horizon, adored throughout Egypt, Local Deity of Abidus. Nefer Autumn, human-headed and crowned with the shant, this God represented the setting sun, or the sun descending to light the lower world, Local Deity of Heliopolis. Thoth, in form a man, Ivis-headed, generally depicted with the pen and pallet of a scribe, was the God of the moon and of letters, Local Deity of Sesun or Homopolis. Seb, the father of the gods and deity of terrestrial vegetation, in form a man with a goose upon his head. Set, represented by a symbolic animal, with muzzle and ears like a jackal, the body of an ass and an upright tail like the tail of a lion, was originally a warlike God and became in later times the symbol of evil and the enemy of Osiris. Khans, hawk-headed, crowned with the sun-disc and horns, is represented sometimes as a youth with a side-lock standing on a crocodile. Horus, Horus appears variously as Horus, Horus Eroes, and Horus Harpacret, Harpacretes, or Horus the Child, is represented under the first two forms as a man, hawk headed, wearing the double crown of Egypt in the latter as a child with the side-lock. Local deity of Edfu, a pulinopolis magna. Mott, a woman draped and crowned with the shent, generally with a cat below the shent representing a vulture, adored at Thebes. Neath, a woman draped, holding sometimes a bow and arrows, crowned with the crown of Lower Egypt. She presided over war and the plume, worshiped at Thebes. Isis, a woman crowned with the sun-disc surmounted by a throne and sometimes enclosed between horns, adored at Abidus and Filet. Her soul resided in Sothis or the dog-star. Nut, a woman curved so as to touch the ground with her fingers. She represents the vault of heaven and is the mother of the gods. Hathor, cow-headed and crowned with the disc in plumes. Deity of Amenti or the Egyptian Hades, worshiped at Dendera. Bast and Sekhet. Bast and Sekhet appear to be two forms of the same goddess. As Sekhet she is represented as a woman, lion-headed with the disc and ureas, as Bast she is cat-headed and holds a system, adored at Bubastus. End of Section 71 A thousand miles up the Nile, Section 72 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Appendix III The Religious Beliefs of the Egyptians Did the Egyptians believe in one eternal God whose attributes were merely symbolized by their numerous deities, or must the whole structure of their faith be resolved into a solar myth with its various and inevitable ramifications. This is the great problem of Egyptology, and it is a problem that has not yet been solved. Egyptologists diverse so widely on the subject that it is impossible to reconcile their opinions. As not even the description of a temple is complete without some reference to this important question, and as the question itself underlies every notion we may form of an ancient Egyptian and ancient Egyptians, I have thought it well to group here a few representative extracts from the works of one or two of the greatest authorities upon the subject. Quote, The religion of the Egyptians consisted of an extended polytheism represented by a series of local groups. The idea of a single deity self-existing or produced was involved in the conception of some of the principal gods, who are said to have given birth to or produced gods, men, all beings and things. Other deities were considered to be self-produced. The sun was the older object of worship, and in his various forms as the rising midday and setting sun, was adored under different names, and was often united, especially at Thebes, to the types of other deities as Amun and Mentu. The oldest of all the local deities, Ptah, who was worshiped at Memphis, was a demiurigist or creator of heaven, earth, gods, and men, and not identified with the sun. Besides the worship of the solar gods, that of Osiris extensively prevailed, and with it the antagonism of Set, the Egyptian devil, the metham psychosis, or transmigration of the soul, the future judgment, the purgatory or Hades, the carniter, the Alua or Elysium, and final union of the soul to the body after the lapse of several centuries. Besides the deities of heaven, the light and the lower world, others personified the elements or presided over the operations of nature, seasons, and events. Guide to the first and second Egyptian rooms, British Museum, S. Birch, 1874. Quote, This religion, obscured as it is by a complex mythology, has lent itself to many interpretations of a contradictory nature, none of which have been unanimously adopted. But that which is beyond doubt, and which shines forth from the text for the whole world's acceptance is the belief in one God. The polytheism of the monuments is but an outward show. The innumerable gods of the pantheon are but manifestations of the one being in his various capacities. That taste for allegory which created the hieroglyphic writing, found vent likewise in the expression of the religious idea, that idea being, as it were, stifled in the later periods by a too abundant symbolism. P. Perret, Dixionaire d'archéologie égyptienne, 1875, translated from article on religion. The God of the Egyptians was unique, perfect, and dude with knowledge and intelligence, and so far incomprehensible, that one can scarcely say in what respects he is incomprehensible. He is the one who exists by essence, the one soul-life of all substance, the one single generator in heaven and earth who is not himself engendered, the father of fathers, the mother of mothers, always the same immutable in immutable perfection, existing equally in the past, the present, and the future. He fills the universe in such wise that no earthly image can give the feeblest notion of his immensity. He is felt everywhere, he is tangible nowhere. G. Maspero, translated from histoire ancienne des pioples de l'Orient, Paris, 1876, Chapter 1, Page 26. Quote, unfortunately the more we study the religion of ancient Egypt, the more our doubts accumulate with regard to the character which must finally be attributed to it. The excavations carried on of late Edendrah and Edfu have opened up to us an extraordinary fertile source of material. These temples are covered with text, and present precisely the appearance of two books which authoritatively treat not only of the gods to which these two temples are dedicated, but of the religion under its more general aspects. But neither in these temples, nor in those which have been long known to us, appears the one God of Jamblicus. If Amon is the first of the first at Thebes, if Ptah is at Memphis, the father of all beings without beginning or end, so also is every other Egyptian God separately endowed with these attributes of the divine being. In other words, we everywhere find gods who are uncreate and immortal, but nowhere that unique, invisible deity without name and without form who was supposed to hover above the highest summit of the Egyptian Pantheon. The temple of Edendrah now explored to the end of its most hidden inscriptions of a certainty furnishes no trace of this deity. The one result which above all others seems to be adduced from the study of this temple is that, according to the Egyptians, the universe was God himself, and that Pantheism formed the foundation of their religion. A. Mariette Bay translated from Eteneri de laute Egypt, Alexandria, 1872, page 54. Quote, The sun is the most ancient object of Egyptian worship found upon the monuments. His birth each day when he springs from the bosom of the nocturnal heaven is the natural emblem of the eternal generation of the divinity. Hence the celestial space became identified with the Divine Mother. It was particularly the nocturnal heaven which was represented by this personage. The rays of the sun as they awakened all nature seemed to give life to animated beings. Hence that which doubtless was originally a symbol became the foundation of the religion. It is the sun himself whom we find habitually invoked as the supreme being. The addition of his Egyptian name Ra to the names of certain local divinities would seem to show that this identification constituted a second epoch in the history of the religions of the Valley of the Nile. Viscount E. de Rouget translated from Notice-Somère des Monuments Egyptiennes du Louvre, Paris, 1873, page 120. That religion, whether based on a solar myth or upon a genuine belief in a spiritual God, became grossly material in its later developments is apparent to every student of the monuments. Monsieur Maspero has the following remarks on the G-generation of the Old Faith. In the course of ages the sense of the religion became obscured. In the text of Greek and Roman date that lofty conception of the divinity which had been cherished by the early theologians of Egypt still peeps out here and there. Fragmentary phrases and epithets yet prove that the fundamental principles of the religion are not quite forgotten. For the most part, however, we find that we no longer have to do with the infinite and intangible God of ancient days, but rather with a God of flesh and blood who lives upon the earth, and has so abased himself as to be no more than a human king. It is no longer this God of whom no man knew either the form or the substance. It is Kenefidesna, Hathor at Dendera, Horus, King of the Divine Dynasty at Edfu. This king has a court, ministers, an army, a fleet. His eldest son, Horhat, Prince of Cush, an heir presumptive to the throne commands the troops. His first minister, Thoth, the inventor of letters, has geography and rhetoric at his finger's ends, is historiograph a royal, and is entrusted with the duty of recording the victories of the king and of celebrating them in high-sounding phrasology. When this God makes war upon his neighbor Typhon, he makes no use of the divine weapons of which we should take it for granted that he could dispose at will. He calls out his archers and his chariots, descends the Nile in his galley as might the last new pharaoh, directs marches and counter-marches, fights battle plans, carries cities by storm, and brings all Egypt in submission to his feet. We see here that the Egyptians of Ptolemaic times had substituted for the one God of their ancestors, a line of God-kings, and had embroidered these modern legends with a host of fantastic details. G. Maspero, translated from Histoire ancienne des Pioples de L'Orient, Paris, 1876, chapter 1, pages 50 through 51, end of section 72. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, section 73. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Appendix 4. Egyptian Chronology. The chronology of Egypt has been a disputed point for centuries. The Egyptians had no cycle, and only dated in the regnal years of their monarchs. The principal Greek sources have been the canon of Ptolemy, drawn up in the second century A.D., and the lists of the dynasties extracted from the historical work of Menetho, an Egyptian priest who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, B.C. 285 to 247. The discrepancies between these lists and the monuments have given rise to many schemes and rectifications of the chronology. The principal chronological points of information obtained from the monuments are the conquest of Egypt by Canbuses, B.C. 527, the commencement of the reign of Somectus I, B.C. 665, the reign of Terhaca, about B.C. 693, and that of Bokyrus, about B.C. 720, the synchronism of the reign of Shishak I with the capture of Jerusalem, about B.C. 970. The principal monuments throwing light on other parts of the chronology are the recorded heliacal risings of Psophus, or the dog-star, in the reigns of Tutmus III and Romases II, III, VI, IX. The date of four hundred years from the time of Romases II to the shepherd-kings, the dated sepulcher tablets of the bull Apis at the Serpium, the lists of kings at Sakara, Thebes, and Abidus, the chronological canon of the Turin papyrus, and other incidental notices. But of the anterior dynasties no certain chronological dates are afforded by the monuments. Those hitherto propose not having stood the test of historical or philological criticism. S. Birch, L.L.D., Guide to the First and Second Egyptian Rooms at the British Museum, 1874, page 10. As some indication of the wide divergence of opinion upon this subject, it is enough to point out that the German Egyptologist alone differ as to the date of Minas or Mina, the first authentic king of the ancient empire, to the following extent. Bulk places Mina in B.C. 5702. Unger places Mina in B.C. 5613. Bulk places Mina in B.C. 4455. Loth places Mina in B.C. 4157. Lepceus places Mina in B.C. 3892. Bunsen places Mina in B.C. 3623. Note from your reader. The remainder of Appendix 4 appears in table form and is difficult to communicate in audio form. In addition, much has been discovered in the 120 years since this book was written, and therefore the Egyptian chronology contained in these tables is rather wildly incorrect, as compared to accepted theories of modern Egyptologists. Therefore the remainder of Appendix 4 has been omitted. End of Reader's Note End of Section 73 1,000 miles up the Nile, Section 74. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 1,000 miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Appendix 5 Contemporary Chronology of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Babylon. A very important addition to our chronological information with regard to the synchronous history of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia has been brought to light during this present year, 1888, by the great discovery of cuneiform tablets at Tel El-Amarna in Upper Egypt. These tablets consist for the most part of letters and dispatches sent to Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV by the kings of Babylonia and the princes and governors of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Some being addressed to Amenhotep IV, Cuen Aten, by Berna Beryes, king of Babylonia, who lived about B.C. 1430. This gives us the date of the life and reign of Amenhotep IV, and consequently the approximate date of the foundation of the city known to us as Tel El-Amarna, and of the establishment of the new religion of the disc worship, and it is the earliest synchronism yet established between the history of ancient Egypt and that of any of her contemporaries. From these tablets we also learned that the consort of Amenhotep IV was a Syrian princess, and daughter of Dushrata, king of Naharina, called in the tablets the land of Mitini, on the upper Euphrates, for a full and learned description of some of the most interesting of these newly discovered documents, see Dr. Ehrman's paper, entitled Durtantofelfund von Tel El-Amarna, read before the Berlin Academy on the 3rd of May, 1888. The End. End of Section 74. End of A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Read by Dr. Heather Ambi, June 2007, Carrollton, Georgia.