 18. Discoveries at Abu-Symbol, Part 1 We came back to find a fleet of Dahabiyas ranged along the shore at Abu-Symbol, and no less than three sketching tents in occupation of the ground. One of these, which happened to be pitched on the precise spot vacated by our painter, was courteously shifted to make way for the original tenant, and in the course of a couple of hours we were all as much at home as if we had not been away for half a day. Here meanwhile was our old acquaintance, the Faustit, with her party of gentlemen, under the Zenobia all ladies, the little Alice, with Sir J. C. and Mr. W. on board, the Serena flying the stars and stripes, the Mansura bound presently for the Fayyum. To these were next day added the Ebers with a couple of German savants, and the Bagstones welcome back from Wadi-Halfa. What with arrivals and departures, exchange of visits, exhibitions of sketches, and sociabilities of various kinds, we now had quite a gay time. The Filet gave a dinner party in Fantasia under the very noses of the Colossi, and every evening there was drumming and howling enough among the assembled crews to raise the ghosts of Ramesses and all his queens. This was pleasant enough while it lasted, but when the strangers dropped off one by one, and at the end of three days we were once more alone, I think we were not sorry. The place somehow was too solemn for singing, laughing, ogling, and all that. It was by comparing our watches with those of the travelers whom we met at Abyssinbol that we now found out how hopelessly our timekeepers and theirs had gone astray. We had been altering ours continually ever since leaving Cairo, but the sun was as continually putting them wrong again, so that we had lost all count of the true time. The first words with which we now greeted a newcomer was, Do you know what o'clock it is? To which the stranger, as invariably replied, that it was the very question he himself was about to ask. The confusion became at last so great that, finding we had about eleven hours of day to thirteen of night, we decided to establish an arbitrary cannon, so we called it seven when the sun rose, and six when it set, which answered every purpose. It was between two and four o'clock, according to this time of hours, that the southern cross was now visible every morning. It is undoubtedly best seen at Abyssinbol. The river here is very wide, and just where the constellation rises there is an opening in the mountains on the eastern bank, so that these four fine stars, though still low in the heavens, are seen in a free space of sky. If they make even so a less magnificent appearance than one has been led to expect, it is probably because we see them from too low a point of view. To say that a constellation is foreshortened sounds absurd, yet that is just what is the matter with the southern cross at Abyssinbol. Viewed at an angle of about thirty degrees, it necessarily looks distort and dim. If seen burning in the zenith it would no doubt come up to the level of its reputation. It was now the fifth day of our return from Wadi-Halfa when an event occurred that roused us to an unwanted pitch of excitement and kept us at high pressure throughout the rest of our time. The day was Sunday, the date February 16th, 1874, the time, according to Filet-Reckoning, about eleven a.m., when the painter, enjoying his seventh day's holiday after his own fashion, went strolling about among the rocks. He happened to turn his steps southwards and passing the front of the great temple climbed to the top of a little shapeless mound of fallen cliff and sand and crude brick wall just against the corner where the mountain slopes down to the river. Immediately round this corner, looking almost due south and approachable by only a narrow ledge of rock, our two votive tablets sculptured and painted both of the thirty-eighth year of Ramaziz II. We had seen these from the river as we came back from Wadi-Halfa and had remarked how fine the view must be from that point. Beyond the fact that they are colored and that the color upon them is still bright, there is nothing remarkable about these inscriptions. There are many such at Abu Simbel. Our painter did not, therefore, come here to examine the tablets. He was attracted solely by the view. Turning back presently, his attention was arrested by some much mutilated sculptures on the face of the rock, a few yards near the south buttress of the temple. He had seen these sculptures before, so indeed had I, when wandering about that first day in search of a point of view, without especially remarking them. The relief was low, the execution slight and the surface so broken away that only a few confused outlines remained. The thing that now caught the painter's eye, however, was a long crack running transversely down the face of the rock. It was such a crack as might have been caused, one would say, by blasting. He stooped, cleared the sand away a little with his hand, observed that the crack widened, poked in the point of his stick, and found that it penetrated to a depth of two or three feet. Even then it seemed to him to stop, not because it encountered any obstacle, but because the crack was not wide enough to admit the thick end of the stick. This surprised him. No mere fault in the natural rock, he thought, would go so deep. He scooped away a little more sand, and still the cleft widened. He introduced the stick a second time. It was a long palm stick like an Alpenstock, and it measured about five feet in length. When he probed the cleft with it the second time it went in freely up to where he held it in his hand. That is to say, to a depth of quite four feet. Convinced now that there was some hidden cavity in the rock, he carefully examined the surface. There were yet visible a few hieroglyphic characters and part of two cartouches, as well as some battered outlines of what had once been figures. The heads of these figures were gone, the face of the rock with whatever may have been sculptured upon it, having come away bodily at this point, while from the waist downwards they were hidden under the sand. Only some hands and arms in short could be made out. They were the hands and arms, apparently, of four figures, two in the center of the composition and two at the extremities. The two center ones which seemed to be back to back probably represented gods, the outer ones worshipers. All at once it flashed upon the painter that he had seen this kind of group many a time before, and generally over a doorway. Feeling sure now that he was on the brink of a discovery he came back, fetched away Solomon Mohammed Ali, and without saying a syllable to anyone, set to work with these two to scrape away the sand at the spot where the crack widened. Meanwhile, the luncheon bell having rung thrice, we concluded that the painter had rambled off somewhere into the desert, and so sat down without him. Towards the close of the meal, however, came a penciled note, the contents of which ran as follows. Pray come immediately. I have found the entrance to a tomb. Please send some sandwiches. AMC. To follow the messenger at once to the scene of action was the general impulse. In less than ten minutes we were there, asking breathless questions, peeping in through the fast widening aperture and helping to clear away the sand. All that Sunday afternoon, heedless of possible sunstroke, unconscious of fatigue, we toiled upon our hands and knees, as for bare life under the burning sun. We had the crew up working like tigers. Everyone helped, even the Drago-man and the two maids. More than once when we paused for a moment's breathing space we said to each other, if those at home could see us what would they say? And now more than ever we felt the need of implements. With the spade or two in a wheel-barrow we could have done wonders. But with only one small fire-shuffle, a birch-broom, a couple of charcoal baskets and about twenty pairs of hands, we were poor indeed. What was wanted in means, however, was made up in method. Some scraped away the sand. Some gathered it into baskets. Some carried the baskets to the edge of the cliff and emptied them into the river. The idle man distinguished himself by scooping out a channel where the slope was steepest, which greatly facilitated the work. Empty down this chute and kept continually going the sand poured off in a steady stream like water. Meanwhile the opening grew rapidly larger. When we first came up, that is, when the painter and the two sailors had been working on it for about an hour, we found a hole scarcely as large as one's hand, through which it was just possible to catch dim glimpse of painted walls within. By sunset the top of the doorway was laid bare and where the crack ended in a large triangular fracture, there was an aperture about a foot-and-a-half square into which Mohammed Ali was the first to squeeze his way. We passed him in a candle in a box of matches, but he came out again directly, saying that it was a most beautiful berba and quite light within. The rider wiggled in next. She found herself looking down from the top of a sand slope into a small square chamber. This sand-drift, which here rose to within a foot and a half of the top of the doorway, was heaped to the ceiling in the corner behind the door. There was light enough to see every detail distinctly, the painted frieze running round just under the ceiling, the bar-relief sculptures on the walls, gorgeous with unfaded color, the smooth sand pitted near the top where Mohammed Ali had trodden, but undisturbed elsewhere by human foot. The great gap in the middle of the ceiling where the rock had given way, the fallen fragments on the floor now almost buried in sand. Satisfied that the place was absolutely fresh and untouched, the rider crawled out and the others one by one crawled in. When each had seen it in turn the opening was barricaded for the night, the sailors being forbidden to enter it, lest they should injure the decorations. That evening was held a solemn council, whereat it was decided that Ptolemy and Raiz Hassan should go to-morrow to the nearest village, there to engage the services of fifty able-bodied natives. With such help we calculated that the place might easily be cleared in two days. If it was a tomb we hoped to discover the entrance to the mummy-pit below, if but a small chapel or speos like those at Ebram, we should at least have the satisfaction of seeing all that it contained in the way of sculptures and inscriptions. This was accordingly done, but we worked again next morning just the same till midday. Our native contingent, numbering about forty men, then made their appearance in a rickety old boat, the bottom of which was half full of water. They had been told to bring implements, and they did bring such as they had, two broken oars to dig with, some baskets, and a number of little slips of planking which, being tied between two pieces of rope and drawn along the surface, acted as scrapers, and were useful as far as they went. Squatting in double file from the entrance of the speos to the edge of the cliff and to the burden of a rude chant propelling these improvised scrapers, the men began by clearing a path to the doorway. This gave them work enough for the afternoon. At sunset when they dispersed the path was scooped out to adept the four feet, like a miniature railway cutting between embankments of sand. Next morning came the shake in person with his two sons and a following of a hundred men. This was so many more than we had bargained for that we at once foresaw a scheme to extort money. The shake, however, proved to be that same Rushwan Eben Hassan el Kashif, by whom the happy couple had been so hospitably entertained about a fortnight before. We therefore received him with honor, invited him to luncheon, and, hoping to get the work done, quickly set the men on in gangs under the superintendents of Raiz Hassan and the head sailor. By noon the door was cleared down to the threshold, and the whole south and west walls were laid bare to the floor. We now found that the debris which blocked the north wall in the center of the floor was not, as we had at first supposed, a pile of fallen fragments, but one solid boulder which had come down bodily from above. To remove this was impossible. We had no tools to cut or break it, and it was both wider and higher than the doorway. Even to clear away the sand which rose behind it to the ceiling would have taken a long time, and have caused the inevitable injury to the paintings around. Already the brilliancy of the color was marred where the men had leaned their backs, all wet with perspiration against the walls. Seeing, therefore, that three fourths of the decorations were now uncovered, and that behind the fallen block there appeared to be no subject of great size and importance, we made up our minds to carry the work no further. Meanwhile, we all had great fun at luncheon with our newbie in shake, a tall, well-featured man with much natural dignity of manner. He was well-dressed, too, and wore a white turban most symmetrically folded, a white vest buttoned to the throat, a long loose robe of black surge, an outer robe of fine black cloth with hanging sleeves and a hood, and on his feet white stockings and scarlet Morocco's shoes. When brought face to face with a knife and fork his embarrassment was great. He was, it seemed, too grand a personage to feed himself. He must have a feeder, as the great man of the Middle Ages had a taster. Ptolemy, accordingly, being promoted to this office, picked out choice bits of mutton and chicken with his fingers, dropped pieces of bread and gravy, and put every morsel into our guests' a-guess mouth, as if the said guest were a baby. The sweets being served, the little lady, Elle, and the writer took him in hand and fed him with all kinds of jams and preserved fruits. Enchanted with these attentions the poor man ate till he could eat no longer, then laid his hand pathetically over the region next to his heart and cried for mercy. After luncheon he smoked his shabouk and coffee was served. Our coffee did not please him. He tasted it but immediately returned the cup, telling the waiter with a grimace that the berries were burned in the coffee week. When, however, we apologized for it he protested with oriental insincerity that it was excellent. To amuse him was easy, for he was interested in everything, in Elle's field-glass, in the painter's accordion, in the piano and the lever-court's groove. With some odour cologne he was also greatly charmed, rubbing it on his beard and inhaling it with closed eyes in a kind of rapture. To make talk was, as usual, the great difficulty. When he had told us that his eldest son was Governor of Dare, that his youngest was five years of age, that the dates of Dare were better than the dates of Wadi-Halfa, and that the Nubian people were very poor, he was at the end of his topics. Finally he requested us to convey a letter from him to Lord D., who had entertained him on board his Dahabiya the year before. Being asked if he had brought his letter with him he shook his head saying, Your dregle man shall write it. So paper and a reed pen were produced, and Ptolemy wrote to dictation as follows. Let have care of you. I hope you are well. I am sorry not to have had a letter from you since you were here. Your brother and friend, Roshwan ebn Hassan el-Kashif. A model letter this, brief, and to the point. End of Section 52. A thousand miles up the Nile, Section 53. 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 XVIII. DISCOVERIES AT ABU SYMBOL PART II Our urbane and gentlemanly shake was, however, not quite so charming when it came to settling time. We had sent it first for fifty men, and the price agreed upon was five piaztras, or about a shilling English for each man per day. In answer to this call there first came forty men for half a day, then a hundred men for a whole day, or what was called a whole day, so making a total of six pounds due for wages. But the descendant of the Kashif's would hear of nothing so commonplace as the simple fulfilment of a straightforward contract. He demanded full pay for a hundred men for two whole days, a gun for himself, and a liberal buck's sheesh in cash. Finding he had asked more than he had any chance of getting, he conceded the question of wages but stood out for a game-bag and a pair of pistols. Finally he was obliged to be content with the six pounds for his men, and for himself two pots of jam, two boxes of sardines, a bottle of vodka alone, a box of pills, and half a sovereign. By four o'clock he and his followers were gone, and we once more had the place to ourselves. So long as they were there it was impossible to do anything, but now for the first time we fairly entered into possession of our newly found treasure. All the rest of that day and all the next day we spent at work in and about the speos. El and the little lady took their books and knitting there and made a little drawing-room of it. The writer copied paintings and inscriptions. The idle man and the painter took measurements and surveyed the ground round about, especially endeavouring to make out the plan of certain fragments of wall, the foundations of which were yet traceable. A careful examination of these ruins and a little clearing of the sand here and there led to further discoveries. They found that the speos had been approached by a large outer hall built of sun-dried brick, with one principal entrance facing the Nile and two entrances facing northwards. The floor was buried deep in sand and debris, but enough of the walls remained above the surface to show that the ceiling had been vaulted and the side entrances arched. The southern boundary wall of this hall, when the surface sand was removed, appeared to be no less than twenty feet in thickness. This was not in itself so wonderful there being instances of ancient Egyptian crude brick walls which measure eighty feet in thickness, but it was astonishing as compared with the north, east, and west walls which measured only three feet. Deeming it impossible that this mass could be solid throughout, the idle man set to work with a couple of sailors to probe the center part of it, and it soon became evident that there was a hollow space about three feet in width running due east and west down not quite exactly the middle of the structure. All at once the idle man thrust his fingers into a skull. This was such an amazing and unexpected incident that for the moment he said nothing, but went on quietly displacing the sand and feeling his way under the surface. The next instant his hand came in contact with the edge of a clay bowl which he carefully withdrew. It measured about four inches in diameter, was hand molded and full of caked sand. He now proclaimed his discoveries and all ran to help in the work. Soon a second and smaller skull was turned up, then another bowl, and then just under the place from which the bowls were taken, the bones of two skeletons all detached, perfectly desiccated and apparently complete. The remains were those of a child and a small grown person, probably a woman. The teeth were sound, the bones wonderfully delicate and brittle. As for the little skull which had fallen apart at the sutures, it was pure and fragile in texture as the cup of a water lily. We laid the bones aside as we found them, examining every handful of sand in the hope of discovering something that might throw light upon the burial. But in vain, we found not a shred of clothing, not a bead, not a coin, not the smallest vestige of anything that might help one to judge whether the internment had taken place a hundred years ago or a thousand. We now called up all the crew and went on excavating downwards into what seemed to be a long and narrow vault, measuring some fifteen feet by three. After reflection convinced us that we had stumbled upon a chance newbie engraved, and that the bowls, which at first we absurdly dignified with the name of siniary urns, were but the usual water bowls placed at the heads of the dead. But we were in no mood for reflection at the time. We made sure the speos was a mortuary chapel, that the vault was a vertical pit leading to a sepulcher chamber, and at the bottom of it we should find who could tell what, mummies perhaps, and sarcophagi, and funerary statuettes, and jewels, and papyri, and wonders without end, that these uncared forebones should be laid in the mouth of such a pit scarcely occurred to us as an incongruity. Supposing them to be newbie and remains, what then? If a modern newbie and at the top, why not an ancient Egyptian at the bottom? As the work of excavation went on, however, the vault was found to be entered by a steep inclined plane. Then the inclined plane turned out to be a flight of much worn and very shallow stairs. These led down to a small square landing some twelve feet below the surface, from which landing an arched doorway and passage opened into the forecourt of the speos. Our sailors had great difficulty in excavating this part, in consequence of the weight of super-incumbent sand and debris on the side next to the speos. By shoring up the ground, however, they were enabled completely to clear the landing, which was curiously paved with cones of rude pottery like the bottoms of amphorae. These cones, of which we took out some twenty-eight or thirty, were not in the least like the celebrated funerary cones found so abundantly at thieves. They bore no stamp, and were much shorter and more lumpy in shape. Finally, the cones being all removed, we came to a compact and solid floor of baked clay. The painter, meanwhile, had also been at work. Having traced the circuit and drawn out a ground plan, he came to the conclusion that the whole mass adjoining the southern wall of the speos was in fact composed of the ruins of a pylon, the walls of which were seven feet in thickness built in regular string courses of molded brick, and finished at the angles with the usual torus or round molding. The superstructure with its chambers, passages, and top cornice was gone, and this part with which we were now concerned was merely the basement, and included the bottom of the staircase. The painter's ground plan demolished all our hopes at one fell swoop. The vault was a vault no longer. The staircase led to no sepulcher chamber. The brick floor had no secret entrance. Our mummies melted into thin air, and we were left with no excuse for carrying on the excavations. We were mortally disappointed. In vain we told ourselves that the discovery of a large brick pylon, the existence of which had been unsuspected by preceding travelers, was an event of greater importance than the finding of a tomb. We had set our hearts on a tomb, and I am afraid we cared less than we ought for the pylon. Having traced thus far the course of the excavations and the way in which one discovery led step by step to another, I must now return to this speos, and as accurately as I can describe it, not only from my notes made on the spot, but by the light of such observations as I afterwards made among structures of the same style and period. I must, however, premise that, not being able to go inside while the excavators were in occupation, and remaining but one whole day at Abu Simbel after the work was ended, I had but short time at my disposal. I would gladly have made colored copies of all the wall paintings, but this was impossible. I therefore was obliged to be content with transcribing the inscriptions and sketching a few of the more important subjects. The rot-cut chamber which I have hitherto described as a speos, and which we at first believed to be a tomb, was in fact neither the one nor the other. It was the additum of a partly built, newly excavated monument, co-evil in date, with the Great Temple. In certain points of design, this monument resembles the contemporary speos of Bate Awele. It is evident, for instance, that the outer halls of both were originally vaulted, and the much mutilated sculptures over the doorway of the excavated chamber at Abu Simbel are almost identical in subject and treatment with those over the entrance to the excavated parts of Bate Awele. As regards general conception, the Abu Simbel monument comes under the same head with the contemporary temples of Durr, Gurf Hossain, and Wadisabua, being in a mixed style which combines excavation with construction. This style seems to have been peculiarly in favor during the reign of Ramesses II. Situate at the southeastern angle of the rock, a little way beyond the facade of the Great Temple, this rot-cut additum and hall of entrance face southeast by east, and command much the same view that is commanded higher up by the temple of Hathor. The additum, or excavated speos, measures twenty-one feet, two and one-half inches in breadth, by fourteen feet, eight inches in length. The height from floor to ceiling is about twelve feet. The doorway measures four feet, three and one-half inches in width, and the outer recess for the door frame five feet. Two large circular holes, one in the threshold and the other in the lintel, mark the place of the pivot on which the door once swung. It is not very easy to measure the outer hall in its present ruined and encumbered state, but as nearly as we could judge its dimensions are as follows. Length twenty-five feet, width twenty-two and one-half feet, width of principal entrance facing the nile six feet, width of two side entrances four feet and six feet respectively, thickness of crude brick walls three feet. Engaged in the brickwork on either side of the principal entrance to this hall are two stone door-jams, and some six or eight feet in front of these there originally stood two stone hawks on hieroglyphed pedestals. One of these hawks we found in situ, the other lay some little distance off, and the painter suspecting nothing of these after-revelations had used it as a post to which to tie one of the main ropes of his sketching tent. A large hieroglyphed slab which I take to have formed part of the door lay overturned against the side of the pylon some few yards nearer the river. As far as the additum and outer hall are concerned the accompanying ground plan which is in part founded on my own measurements and in part borrowed from the ground plan drawn out by the painter may be accepted as tolerably correct, but with regard to the pylon I can only say with certainty that the central staircase is three feet in width, and that the walls on each side of it are seven feet in thickness. So buried is it in debris and sand that even to indicate where the building ends and the rubbish begins at the end next to the nile is impossible. This part is therefore left indefinite in the ground plan. So far as we could see there was no stone revetiment upon the inner side of the walls of the Proneos. If anything of the kind ever existed some remains of it would probably be found by thoroughly clearing the area, an interesting enterprise for any who may have leisure to undertake it. I have now to speak of the decorations of the additum, the walls of which, from immediately under the ceiling to within three feet of the floor, are covered with religious subjects elaborately sculptured in bar relief, coated as usual with a thin film of stucco, and colored with the richness for which I know no parallel, except in the tomb of Seti I at Thebes. Above the level of the drifted sand this color was as brilliant in tone and as fresh in surface as on the day when it was transferred to those walls, from the pallet of the painter. All below that level, however, was dimmed and damaged. The ceiling is surrounded by a freeze of cartuchess supported by sacred asps, each cartouche with its supporters being divided from the next by a small sitting figure. These figures in other respects uniform where the symbolic heads of various gods, the cowhead of Hathor, the ibishead of Thoth, the hawkhead of Horus, the jackalhead of Anubis, etc., etc. The cartuchess contained the ordinary style and title of Ramesses II, Ra Yusermas Sotepin Ra Ramessesmer Amen, and are surmounted by a row of sun-dists. Under each sitting god is depicted the phonetic hieroglyph signifying myrrh or beloved. By means of this device the whole freeze assumes the character of a connected legend, and describes the king not only as beloved of Amen, but as Ramesses' beloved of Hathor of Thoth of Horus, in short of each god depicted in the series. These gods accepted the freeze is almost identical in design with the freeze in the first hall of the great temple. The west or principal wall facing the entrance is divided into two large subjects, each containing two figures the size of life. In the division to the right Ramesses II worships Ra, in the division to the left he worships Amen Ra, thus following the order observed in the other two temples, where the subjects relating to Amen Ra occupy the left half, and the subjects relating to Ra occupy the right half of each structure. An upright ensign surmounted by an exquisitely drawn and colored head of Horus Aeroas separates these two subjects. In the subject to the right Ramesses wearing the red and white shent presents an offering of two small aribolus vases without handles. The vases are painted blue and are probably intended to represent Lapis Lazuli, a substance much prized by the ancient Egyptians, and known to them by the name of Kesbet. The king's necklace, armlets, and bracelets are also blue. Ra sits enthroned, holding in one hand the ankh, or crux ansada, emblem of life, and in the other the greyhound headed scepter of the gods. He is hawk-headed and crowned with the sun-disk and asp. His flesh is painted bright Venetian red. He wears a pectoral ornament, a rich necklace of alternate vermilion and black drops, and a golden yellow belt studded with red and black stones. The throne, which stands on a blue platform, is painted in stripes of red, blue, and white. The platform is decorated with a row of gold-colored stars and ankh emblems picked out with red. At the foot of this platform between the god and the king stands a small altar, on which are placed the usual blue lotus with red stalk and a spouted libation vessel. To the left of the Horus-enzen seated back to back with ra upon a similar throne sits Amun-ra. Of all Egyptian gods the most terrible to look upon, with his blue-black complexion, his corselet of golden chain armor, and his head-dress of towering plumes. Here the wonderful preservation of the surface enabled one to see by what means the ancient artists were wont to produce this singular blue-black effect of color. It was evident that the flesh of the god had first been laid in with dead black, and then colored over with a dry, powdery cobalt blue, through which the black remained partly visible. She carries in one hand the ankh, and in the other the gray-hound-headed scepter. Romacy's the second of Speos. To him advances the king, his right hand uplifted, and in his left a small basket containing a votive statuette of Ma, the goddess of truth and justice. Ma is, however, shorn of her distinctive feather, and holds the jackal-headed staff instead of the customary crux on Sada. As portraiture there is not much to be said for any of these heads of Romacy's the second, but the features bear a certain resemblance to the well-known profile of the king. The action of the figure is graceful and animated, and the drawing displays in all its purity the firm and flowing line of Egyptian draftmanship. The dress of the king is very rich in color. The meter-shaped cask, being of a vivid cobalt blue, picked out with gold color, the belt, necklace, armlets, and bracelets of gold, studded apparently with precious stones, the apron green and gold. Over the king's head hovers the sacred vulture emblem of Ma, holding in her claws a kind of scudgeon upon which is depicted the crux on Sada. The south wall. The subjects represented on this wall are as follows. One. Romacy's life-size presiding over a table of offerings. The king wears upon his head the cloth, or headcloth, wrapped gold and white, and decorated with the aereus. The table is piled in the usual way with flesh, fowl, and flowers. The surface being here quite perfect the details of these objects are seen to be rendered with surprising minuteness. Even the tiny black feather stumps of the plucked geese are given with the fidelity of Chinese art, while a red gash in the breast of each shows in what way it was slain for the sacrifice. The loaves are shaped precisely like the so-called cottage loaves of today, and have the same little depression in the top made by the baker's finger. Lotus and papyrus blossoms in elaborate bouquet-holders crown the pile. Two. Two tripods of light and elegant design containing flowers. Three. The barry or sacred boat painted gold color with the usual veil half-drawn across the naos or shrine. The prow of the boat being richly carved, decorated with the ouda or symbolic eye, and preceded by a large fan of ostrich feathers. The boat is peopled with small black figures, one of which kneels at the stern, while a sphinx cuchante with black body and human head keeps watch at the prow. The sphinx symbolizes the king. End of section fifty-four. A thousand miles up the Nile, section fifty-four. 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 XVIII. DISCOVERIES AT ABU SIMBLE, PART III. On this wall in a space between the sacred boat and the figure of Ramazes occurs the following inscription, sculptured in high relief and elaborately colored. TRANSLATION Said by Thoth, the Lord of Sessanu, residing in Amunheri, I give to thee an everlasting sovereignty over the two countries, O son of my body, beloved, Raghusurma Sotepanra, acting as propitiator of thy ka. I give to thee myriads of festivals of Ramazes, beloved of Amun, Raghusurma Sotepanra, as prince of every place where the sun-disk revolves. The beautiful living God, the maker of beautiful things for his father Thoth, Lord of Sessanu, residing in Amunheri, he made mighty and beautiful monuments for ever facing the eastern horizon of heaven. The meaning of which is that Thoth, addressing Ramazes II, then living and reigning, promises him a long life and many anniversaries of his jubilee, in return for the works made in his, Thoth's, Honor, and Abu-Simbal and elsewhere. NORTH WALL At the upper end of this wall is depicted a life-sized, female figure wearing an elaborate blue headdress surmounted by a disk in two ostrich feathers. She holds in her right hand the ankh, and in her left the jackal-headed scepter. This not being the scepter of a goddess, and the headdress resembling that of the queen as represented on the façade of the Temple of Hathor, I conclude we have here a portrait of Nefertari corresponding to the portrait of Ramazes on the opposite wall. Near her stands a table of offerings, on which, among other objects, are placed four vases of a rich blue color traversed by bands of yellow. They perhaps represent the kind of glass known as the false murine. Each of these vases contains an object like a pine. The ground color of which is deep yellow, patterned over with scale-like subdivisions in vermilion. We took them to represent grains of maize pyramidically piled. Lastly appended to that opposite wall comes the sacred bari. It is, however, turned the reverse way, with its prow towards the east, and it rests upon an altar in the center of which are the cartouches of Ramazes II, and a small hieroglyphic inscription signifying, beloved by Amenra, king of the gods resident in the land of Kenes. Beyond this point, at the end nearest the northeast corner of the chamber, the piled sand conceals whatever else the wall may contain in the way of decoration. East Wall If the east wall is decorated like the others, which may be taken for granted, its teblos and inscriptions are hidden behind the sand which here rises to the ceiling. The doorway also occurs in this wall, occupying a space four feet, three and one-half inches in width on the inner side. One of the most interesting incidents connected with the excavation of this little aditum remains yet to be told. I have described the female figure at the upper end of the north wall, and how she holds in her right hand the ankh, and in her left the jackal-headed scepter. The hand that holds the ankh hangs by her side. The hand that holds the scepter is half raised. Close under this upraised hand, at the height of between three and four feet from the actual level of the floor, there were visible upon the uncolored surface of the original stucco several lines of freehand writing. This writing was laid on, apparently, with the brush, and the ankh, if it had ever been black, had now become brown. Five long lines and three shorter lines were uninjured. Though these were traces of other fragmentary lines almost obliterated by the sand, we knew at once that this quaint, faint writing must be in either the heretic or demotic hand. We could distinguish, or thought we could distinguish, in its vague outlines of forms already familiar to us in the hieroglyphs, abstracts, as it were, of birds and snakes and boats. There could be no doubt at all events that the thing was curious, and we set it down in our minds as the writing of either the architect or decorator of the place. Hieratic inscription North Wall of Speos, translated by S. Birch, Esquire, thy son having thou has conquered the worlds at once Amun Ra, Harmakis, the god at the first time, who gives life, health, and a time of many praises to the groom. Of the ken, son of the royal son of Kush, opener of the road, maker of transport boats, giver of instructions to his lord. Amun Shah Anxious to make if possible an exact facsimile of this inscription, the writer copied it three times. The last and best of these copies is here reproduced in photolithography, with a translation from the pen of the late Dr. Birch. We all know how difficult it is to copy correctly in a language of which one is ignorant, and the tiniest curve or dot omitted is fatal to the sense of these ancient characters. In the present instance, notwithstanding the care with which the transcript was made, there must still have been errors, for it has been found undecipherable in places, and in these places there occur inevitable akunai. Enough, however, remains to show that the lines were written, not as we had supposed by the artist, but by a distinguished visitor, whose name, unfortunately, is illegible. The visitor was a son of the prince of Kush, or, as it is literally written, the royal son of Kush, that being the official title of the governor of Ethiopia. As there were certainly eight governors of Ethiopia during the reign of Ramesses II, and perhaps more whose names have not reached us, it is impossible even to hazard a guess at the parentage of our visitor. We gather, however, that he was sent hither to construct a road, also that he built transport boats, and that he exercised priestly functions in that part of the temple which was inaccessible to all but dignitaries of the sacerdotal order. Sight inscriptions and decorations taken into account there yet remains this question to be answered. What was the nature and character of the monument just described? It adjoined a pylon, and, as we have seen, consisted of a vaulted pronios in crude brick, and an aditum excavated in the rock. On the walls of this aditum are depicted various gods with their attributes, votive offerings, and portraits of the king performing acts of adoration. The bari, or ark, is also represented upon the north and south walls of the aditum. These are unquestionably the ordinary features of a temple or chapel. On the other hand there must be noted certain objections to these premises. It seemed to us that the pylon was built first, and that the south boundary wall of the pronios, being a subsequent erection, was supported against the slope of the pylon as far as where the spring of the vaulting began. Besides which the pylon would have been a disproportionately large adjunct to a little monument, the entire length of which, from the doorway of the pronios to the west wall of the aditum, was less than forty-seven feet. We therefore concluded that the pylon belonged to the large temple and was erected at the side, instead of in front of the facade, on account of the very narrow space between the mountain and the river. The pylon at Com Ambo is probably for the same reason placed at the side of the temple and on a lower level. To those who might object that a brick pylon would hardly be attached to a temple of the first class, I would observe that the remains of a similar pylon are still to be seen at the top of what was once the landing-place leading to the great temple at Wadi Halfa. It may therefore be assumed that this little monument, although connected with the pylon by means of a doorway and staircase, was an excrescence of later date. Being an excrescence, however, was it in the strict sense of the word a temple? Even this seems to be doubtful. In the aditum there is no trace of any altar, no fragment of stone dais or sculptured image, no granite shrine as at Filet, no sacred recess as at Dendera. The standard of Horus Aeroas engraved on page 340 occupies the center-place upon the wall facing the entrance, and occupies it not as a tunillary divinity, but as a decorative device to separate the two large subjects already described. Again the gods represented in these subjects are Ra and Amenra, the tunillary gods of the great temple, but if we turn to the dedicatory inscription on page 344 we find that Thoth, whose image never occurs at all upon the walls, unless as one of the little gods in the cornest, is really the presiding deity of the place. It is he who welcomes Ramesses and his offerings, who acknowledges the glory given to him by his beloved son, and who, in return for the great and good monuments erected in his honor, promises the king that he shall be given an everlasting sovereignty over the two countries. Now Thoth was par excellence the god of letters. He is styled the lord of divine words, the lord of the sacred writings, the spouse of truth. He personifies the divine intelligence. He is the patron of art and science, and he is credited with the invention of the alphabet. In one of the most interesting of Champollion's letters from Thebes, he relates how, in the fragmentary ruins of the western extremity of the Ramessium, he found a doorway adorned with the figures of Thoth and Saphic. Thoth as the god of literature, and Saphic inscribed with the title of Lady President of the Hall of Books. At Dendurah there was a chamber especially set apart for the sacred writings, and its walls are sculptured all over with a catalog resume of the manuscript treasures of the temple. At Edfu a kind of closet built up between two pillars of the Hall of Assembly was reserved for the same purpose. Every temple, in short, had its library, and as the Egyptian books, being written on papyrus or leather, rolled up and stored in coffers, occupied but little space, the rooms appropriated to this purpose were generally small. It was Dr. Birch's opinion that our little monument may have been the library of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel. This being the case, the absence of an altar and the presence of Ra and Amun Ra in the two principal tabloes are sufficiently accounted for. The tutelary deity of the Great Temple and the patron deity of Ramesses II would naturally occupy, in this subsidiary structure, the same places that they occupy in the principal one, while the library, though in one sense the domain of thought, is still under the protection of the gods of the temple to which it is an adjunct. I do not believe we once asked ourselves how it came to pass that the place had remained hidden all these ages long, yet its very freshness proved how early it must have been abandoned. If it had been opened in the time of the successors of Ramesses II, they would probably, as elsewhere, have interpolated inscriptions and cartouches, or have substituted their own cartouches for those of the founder. If it had been opened in the time of the Ptolemies and Caesars, traveling Greeks and learned Romans and strangers from Byzantium and the cities of Asia Minor, would have cut their names on the door jams and scribbled ex-votos on the walls. If it had been opened in the days of Nubian Christianity, the sculptures would have been coated with mud and washed with lime and doved with pious caricatures of St. George and the Holy Family. But we found it intact, as perfectly preserved as a tomb that had lain hidden under the rocky bed of the desert. For these reasons I am inclined to think that it became inaccessible shortly after it was completed. There can be little doubt that a wave of earthquake passed during the reign of Ramesses II, along the left bank of the Nile, standing possibly above Wadi Halfa and extending at least as far north as Gurf Hasein. Such a shock might have wrecked the temple at Wadi Halfa as it dislocated the pylon of Wadi Sabua and shook the built-out porticole of Durr and Gurf Hasein, which last four temples, as they do not, I believe, show signs of having been added to by later pharaohs, may be supposed to have been abandoned in consequence of the ruin which had befallen them. Here at all events it shook the mountain of the great temple, cracked one of the Osiride columns of the first hall, shattered one of the four great Colossi, more or less injured the other three, flung down the great brick pylon, reduced the proneos of the library to a heap of ruin, and not only brought down part of the ceiling of the excavated aditum, but rent to open a vertical fissure in the rock some twenty or twenty-five feet in length. With so much irreparable damage done to the great temple, and with so much that was reparable calling for immediate attention, it is no wonder that these brick buildings were left to their fate. The priests would have rescued the sacred books from among the ruins, and then the place would have been abandoned. So much by way of conjecture. As hypothesis a sufficient reason is perhaps suggested for the wonderful state of preservation in which the little chamber had been handed down to the present time. A rational explanation is also offered for the absence of later cartouches, of Greek and Latinx photos, of Christian emblems, and of subsequent mutilation of every kind. Four saved that one contemporary visitor, the son of the royal son of Kush, the place contained when we opened it no record of any passing traveller, no defacing autograph of tourist, archaeologist, or scientific explorer. Neither Belzoni nor Shampoleon had found it out, even lepsias had passed it by. It happens sometimes that hidden things, which in themselves are easy to find, escape detection because no one thinks of looking for them. But such was not the case in this present instance. Search had been made here again and again, and even quite recently. It seems that when the kadeev entertains distinguished guests and sends them in gorgeous dahabias up the Nile, he grants them a virgin mound, or so many square feet of a famous necropolis, lets them dig as deep as they please, and allows them to keep whatever they may find. Sometimes he sends out scouts to beat the ground, and then a tomb is found and left unopened, and the illustrious visitor is allowed to discover it. When the scouts are unlucky it may even sometimes happen that an old tomb is restocked, carefully closed up, and then with all the charm of unpremeditation reopened a day or two after. Now Sheikh Rashwan ebn Hassan el-Kashiv told us that in 1869 when the Empress of the French was at Abu-Symbol, and again when the Prince and Princess of Wales came up in 1872 after the Prince's illness, he received strict orders to find some hitherto undiscovered tomb in order that the kadeev's guest might have the satisfaction of opening it. But he added, although he left no likely place untried among the rocks and valleys on both sides of the river, he could find nothing. To have unearthed such a berba as this would have done him good service with the government, and have ensured him a splendid baksheesh from Prince or Empress. As it was he was reprimanded for want of diligence, and he believed himself to have been out of favour ever since. I may hear mention in order to have done with this subject that besides being buried outside to a depth of eight feet, the aditum had been partially filled inside by a gradual infiltration of sand from above. This can only have accumulated at the time when the old sand drift was at its highest. That drift, sweeping in one and broken line across the front of the great temple, must at one time have risen to a height of twenty feet above the present level. From thence the sand had found its way down the perpendicular fissure already mentioned. In the corner behind the door the sandpile rose to the ceiling in shape just like the deposit at the bottom of an hourglass. I am informed by the painter that when the top of the doorway was found and an opening first affected, the sand poured out from within like water escaping from an open sluice. Here then is positive proof, if proof were needed, that we were first to enter the place, at all events since the time when the great sand drift rose as high as the top of the fissure. The painter wrote his name and hours with the date, February 16, 1874, on a space of blank wall over the inside of the doorway, and this was the only occasion upon which any of us left our names upon an Egyptian monument. On arriving at Carrasco, where there is a post office, he also dispatched a letter to the Times, briefly recording the facts here related. That letter, which appeared on the 18th of March following, is reprinted in the appendix at the end of this book. I am told that our names are partially effaced, and that the wall paintings which we had the happiness of admiring in all their beauty and freshness are already much injured. Which is the fate of every Egyptian monument, great or small. The tourist carves it all over with names and dates, and in some instances with caricatures. The student of Egyptology, by taking wet paper squeezes, sponges away every vestige of the original color. The collector buys and carries off everything of value that he can get, and the Arab steals for him. The work of destruction, meanwhile, goes on apace. There is no one to prevent it. There is no one to discourage it. Every day more inscriptions are mutilated, more tombs are rifled, more paintings and sculptures are defaced. The Louvre contains a full-length portrait of Setti I, cut out bodily from the walls of his sepulchre in the valley of the tombs of the kings. The museums of Berlin, of Turin, of Florence are rich in spoils which tell their own lamentable tale. When science leads the way, is it wonderful that ignorance should follow? END OF SECHSION XIV There are fourteen temples between Abu Simbel and Filet to say nothing of grottoes, tombs, and other ruins. As a rule people begin to get tired of temples about this time and vote them too plentiful. Meek travelers go through them as a duty, but the greater number rebel. Our happy couple, I grieved to say, went over to the majority. Dead to shame they openly proclaimed themselves bored. They even skipped several temples. For myself I was never bored by them, though they had been twice as many I should not have wished them fewer. Miss Martino tells how, in this part of the river, she was scarcely satisfied to sit down to breakfast without having first explored a temple. But I could have breakfasted, dined, subbed on temples. My appetite for them was insatiable and grew with what it fed upon. I went over them all. I took notes of them all. I sketched them every one. I may as well say at once that I shall reproduce but few of those notes, and only some of those sketches in the present volume. If surrounded by their local associations these ruins fail to interest many who travel far to see them, it is not to be supposed that they would interest readers at home. Here and there, perhaps, might be one who would care to pour with me over every broken sculpture, to spell out every half-legible cartouche, to trace through Greek and Roman influences, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in these Nubian buildings. The slow deterioration of the Egyptian style. But the world, for the most part, reserves itself, and rightly, for the great epics and the great names of the past, and because it has not yet had too much of karnak, of abu symbol, of the pyramids, it sets slight store by these minor monuments which record the periods of foreign rule and decline of native art. For these reasons, therefore, I propose to dismiss very briefly many places upon which I bestowed hours of delightful labor. We left abu symbol just as the moon was rising on the evening of the eighteenth of February, and dropped down with the current for three or four miles before mooring for the night. At six next morning the men began rowing, and at half past eight the heads of the Colossae were still looking placidly after us across the ridge of intervening hills. They were then more than five miles distant in a direct line, but every feature was still distinct in the early daylight. One went up again and again, as long as they remained in sight, and bad goodbye to them at last with that same heartache which comes of a farewell view of the Alps. When I say that we were seventeen days getting from abu symbol to filet, and that we had the wind against us from sunrise to sunset almost every day, it will be seen that our progress was of the slowest. To those who were tired of temples, and to the crew who were running short of bread, these long days of lying up under the bank of rocking to and fro in the middle of the river were dreary enough. Slowly but surely, however, the hard one miles go by. Sometimes the barren desert hems us in to right and left, with never a blade of green between the rock and the river. Sometimes, as at Tosco, we come upon an open tract where there are palms and castorberry plantations and corn fields alive with quail. The idle man goes ashore at Tosco with his gun, while the little lady and the rider climb a solitary rock about two hundred feet above the river. The bank shelves here, and a crescent-like wave of inundation, about three miles in length, overflows it every season. From this height one sees exactly how far the wave goes, and how it must make a little bay when it is there. Now it is a bay of barley, full to the brim and rippling with the breeze. Beyond the green comes the desert, the one defined against the other as sharply as water against land. The desert looks wonderfully old beside the young green of the corn, and the Nile flows wide among sandbanks like a tidal river near the sea. The village, squared off in parallelograms like a cattle-market, lies mapped out below. A field-glass shows that the houses are simply cloistered courtyards roved with palm-thatch, the shake's house being larger than the rest, with the usual open space and spreading sycamore in front. There are women moving to and fro in the courtyards, and husbandmen in the castorberry-passages. A funeral with a train of whalers goes out presently towards the burial-ground on the edge of the desert. The idle man, a slight figure with a veil twisted round his hat, wades, half hidden through the barley, signaling his whereabouts every now and then by a puff of white smoke. A cargo-boat, stripped in shorn, comes floating down the river, making no visible progress. A native falooka, carrying one tattered brown sail, goes swiftly up with the wind at a pace that will bring her to Abu Simbel before nightfall. Already she is past the village, and those black specks yonder, which we had never dreamed were crocodiles, have slipped off into the water at her approach. And now she is far in the distance, that glowing, inimitable distance, traversed by long silvery reaches of river, and ending in a vast flat, so blue and aerial that, but for some three or four notches of purple peaks on the horizon, one could scarcely discern the point at which land and sky melt into each other. Ibram comes next, then Durr, then Wadi Sabua. At Ibram, as at Durr, there are fair families whose hideous light hair and blue eyes grafted on brown-black skins date back to Bosni and forefathers of three hundred and sixty years ago. These people give themselves heirs, and are the oat no bless of the place. The men are lazy and quarrelsome. The women trail longer robes, where more beads and rings, and they're altogether more unattractive and castor-oily than any we have seen elsewhere. They keep slaves, too. We saw these unfortunates trotting at the heels of their mistresses, like dogs. Knowing slavery to be officially illegal in the dominions of the Kediv, the M.B.s applied to a dealer who offered them an Abyssinian girl for ten pounds. This useful article warranted a bargain was to sweep, wash, milk, and churn, but was not equal to cooking. The M.B.s it is needless to add, having verified the facts retired from the transaction. At dare we pay a farewell visit to the temple, and at Amada, arriving towards close of day, we see the great view for the last time in the glory of sunset. And now, though the north wind blows persistently, it gets hotter every day. The crocodiles like it, and come out to bask in the sunshine. Called up one morning in the middle of breakfast we see, too, a little one and a big one on a sand bank nearby. The men rest upon their oars. The boat goes with the stream. No one speaks, no one moves. Breathlessly and in dead silence we drift till we are close beside them. The big one is rough and black like the trunk of a London Elm, and measures full eighteen feet in length. The little one is pale and greenish, and glistens like glass. All at once the old one starts, doubles itself up for a spring, and disappears with a tremendous splash. But the little one, apparently unconscious of danger, lifts its tortoise-like head, and eyes us side-wise. Presently someone whispers, and that whisper breaks the spell. Our little crocodile flings up its tail, plunges down the bank, and is gone in a moment. The crew could not understand how the idle man, after lying in wait for crocodiles at Abu Simbal, should let this rare chance pass without a shot. But we had heard since, then, of so much indiscriminate slaughter at the Second Cataract, that he was resolved to bear no part in the extermination of those old historic reptiles. That a sportsman should wish for a single trophy is not unreasonable, but that scores of cracked shot should go up every winner killing and wounding these wretched brutes at an average rate from twelve to eighteen per gun is mere butchery, and cannot be too strongly reprehended. Over by year the creatures become shyer and fewer, and the day is probably not far distant when a crocodile will be as rarely seen below Semna, as it is now rarely seen below Aswan. The thermometer stands at eighty-five degrees in the saloon of the filet when we come one afternoon to Wadi Sabua, where there is a solitary temple drowned in sand. It was approached once by an avenue of Sphinxes and standing Colossae, now shattered and buried. The roof of the Pranaeus, if it was ever rubed, is gone. The inner halls and the sanctuary, all excavated in the rock, are choked and impassable. Only the propylon stands clear of sand, and that, massive as it is, looks as if one touch of a battering ram would bring it to the ground. Every huge stone in it is loose. Every block in the corner seems tottering in its place. In all this we fancy we recognize the work of our Abu Sembel earthquake. At Wadi Sabua we see a fat native. The fact claims record because it is so uncommon. A stalwart, middle-aged man dressed in a tattered kilt and carrying a palm-staff in his hand, he stands before us the living double of the famous wooden statue at Bulac. He is followed by his two wives and three or four children, all bent upon trade. The women have trinkets, the boys a live chameleon and a small stuffed crocodile for sale. While the painter is bargaining for the crocodile and L for a nose-ring, the writer makes acquaintance with a pair of self-important hoopos who live in the pylon and evidently regarded as a big nest of their own building. They sit observing me curiously while I sketch, nodding their crested poles and chattering disparagingly, like a couple of critics. By and by comes a small black bird with a white breast and sings deliciously. It is like no little bird that I have ever seen before, but the song that pours so lavishly from its tiny throat is as sweet and brilliant as a canary's. Powerless against the wind, the dahabiya lies idle day after day in the sun. Sometimes when we chance to be near a village, the native squat on the bank and stare at us for hours together. The moment anyone appears on deck they burst into a chorus of shish. There is but one way to get rid of them, and that is to sketch them. The effect is instantaneous. With a good-sized block and a pencil a whole village may be put to flight at a moment's notice. If on the other hand one wishes for a model, the difficulty is insuperable. The painter tried in vain to get some of the women and girls, not a few of whom were really pretty, to sit for their portraits. I well remember one haughty beauty, shaped and draped like a Juneau, who stood on the bank one morning, scornfully watching all that was done on deck. She carried a flat basket, backhanded, and her arms were covered with bracelets, and her fingers with rings. Her little girl, in a Madame Nubia fringe, clung to her skirts, half wondering, half frightened. The painter sent out an ambassador plenipotentary to offer anything from sixpence to half a sovereign if she would only stand like that for half an hour. The manner of her refusal was grand. She drew her shawl over her face, took her child's hand, and stalked away like an offended goddess. The rider, meanwhile, hidden behind a curtain, had snatched a tiny sketch from the cabin window. On the western bank, somewhere between Wadi Sabua and Maharakah, in a spot quite bare of vegetation stands the ruins of a fortified town, which is neither mentioned by Murray nor entered in the maps. It is built high on a base of reddish rock and commands the river and the desert. The painter and rider explored it one afternoon in the course of a long ramble. Climbing first a steep slope strewn with masonry, we came to the remains of a stone gateway. Finding this impassable we made our way through a breach in the battle-minted wall, and thence up a narrowed road down which had been poured a cataract of debris. Skirting a ruined posterne at the top of this road, we found ourselves in a close labyrinth of vaulted arcades built of crude brick and lit at short intervals by openings in the roof. These strange streets, for they were streets, were lined on either side by small dwellings built of crude brick on stone foundations. We went into some of the houses, mere ruined courts and roofless chambers, in which were no indications of hearths or staircases. In one lay a fragment of stone column about fourteen inches in diameter. The air in these ancient streets was foul and stagnant, and the ground was everywhere heaped with fragments of black, red, and yellowish pottery, like the shards of elephantine and filet. A more desolate place in a more desolate situation I never saw. It looked as if it had been besieged, sacked, and abandoned a thousand years ago, which is probably under the mark, for the character of the pottery would seem to point to the period of Roman occupation. Noting how the brick superstructures were reared on apparently earlier masonry, we concluded that the beginnings of this place were probably Egyptian, and the later work Roman. The marvel was that any town should have been built and so bare in a spot, there being not so much as an inch wide border of lentils for a mile or more between the river and the desert. Having traversed the place from end to end, we came out through another breach on the westward side, and thinking to find a sketchable point of view inland struck down towards the plain. In order to reach this, one must first skirt a deep ravine which divides the rock of the citadel from the desert. Following the brink of this ravine to the point at which it falls into the level, we found to our great surprise that we were treading the banks of an extinct river. It was full of sand now, but beyond all question it had once been full of water. It came evidently from the mountains over towards the northwest. We could trace its windings for a long way across the plain, thence through the ravine and on southwards in a line parallel with the Nile. Here beneath our feet were the water-worn rocks through which it had fretted its way, and yonder half buried in sand were the boulders it had rounded and polished, and borne along in its course. I doubt, however, if when it was a river of water this stream was half as beautiful as now when it is a river of sand. It was turbid then, no doubt, and charged with sediment. Now it is more golden than pactilus, and covered with ripples more playful and undulating than were ever modeled by Cannelletti's pencil. Supposing yonder town to have been founded in the days when the river was a river, and the plain fertile and well watered, the mystery of its position is explained. It was protected in front by the Nile, and in the rear by the ravine and the river. But how long ago was this? Here apparently was an independent stream taking its rise among the Libyan mountains. It dated back, consequently, to a time when these barren hills collected and distributed water. It is to say, to a time when it used to rain in Nubia. And that time must have been before the rocky barrier broke down at Cilcilus, in the old days when the land of Kush flowed with milk and honey. It would rain even now in Nubia if it could. That same evening when the sun was setting we saw a fan-like drift of dappled cloud miles high above our heads, melting as it seemed in fringes of iridescent vapor. We could distinctly see those fringes forming, wavering, and evaporating, unable to descend as rain, because dispersed at a high altitude by radiated heat from the desert. This with one exception was the only occasion on which I saw clouds in Nubia. Coming back we met a solitary native, with a string of beads in his hand and a knife up his sleeve. He followed us for a long way, volunteering a but half- intelligible story about some unknown berba in the desert. We asked where it was, and he pointed up the course of our unknown river. "'You have seen it,' said the painter. Maret Ketter, many times. How far is it? One day's march in the haggar desert. And have no Inglisa ever been to look for it?' He shook his head at first, not understanding the question, then looked grave and held up one finger. Our stock of Arabic was so small, and his so interlarded with Kenzie, that we had great difficulty in making out what he said next. We gathered, however, that some Hawaji, travelling alone and on foot, had once gone in search of this berba, and never come back. Was he lost? Was he killed? Who could say? It was a long time ago, said the man with the beads. It was a long time ago, and he took no guide with him. We would have given much to trace the river to its source and search for this unknown temple in the desert. But it is one of the misfortunes of this kind of travelling that one cannot easily turn aside from the beaten track. The hot season is approaching, the river is running low, the daily cost of the Dahabiya is exorbitant, and in Nubia, where little or nothing can be bought in the way of food, the dilatory traveller risks starvation. It was something, however, to have seen with one's own eyes that the Nile, instead of flowing for a distance of twelve hundred miles unfed by any affluent, had here received waters of a tributary. To those who have a south breeze behind them the temples must now follow in quick succession. We, however, achieved them by degrees and rejoiced when our helpless Dahabiya lay within rowing reach of anything worth seeing. Thus we pulled down one day to Meharaka, in itself a dull ruin, but picturesquely desolate. Seen as one comes up the bank on landing, two parallel rows of column stand boldly up against the sky, supporting a ruined entablature. In the foreground a few stunted dome palms starve in an arid soil. The barren desert closes in the distance. We are beset here by an insolent crowd of savage-looking men and boys, and impudent girls with long frizzy hair and nubian fringes, who pester us with beads and pebbles, dance, shout, slap their legs and clap their hands in our faces, and pelt us when we go away. One ragged warrior brandishes an antique brass-mounted firelock full six feet long in the barrel, and some of the others carry slender spears. The temple, a late Roman structure, would seem to have been wrecked by earthquake before it was completed. The masonry is all in the rough. Pillars, as they came from the quarry, capitals blocked out, waiting for the carver. These unfinished ruins, of which every stone looks new as if the work was still in progress, affect one's imagination strangely. On a fallen wall south of the portico the idle man detected some remains of a Greek inscription. But for hieroglyphic characters, or cartouches by which the date the building, we looked in vain. CHAPTER 19 BACK THROUGH NEWBYA PART II DACA COMES NEXT IN ORDER THEN GERF HOSAIN, DENDOR, AND KALAMSHE. Being at DACA soon after sunrise we find the whole population, screaming, pushing, chattering, laden with eggs, pigeons and gourds for sale, drawn up to receive us. There is a large sand island in the way, so we moor about a mile above the temple. We first saw the twin pylons of DACA some weeks ago from the deck of the filet, and we likened them to the majestic towers of Edfu. Approaching them now by land we are surprised to find them so small. It is a brilliant, hot morning, and our way lies by the river, between the lentil slope and the castorberry patches. There are flocks of pigeons flying low overhead, barking dogs and crowing cocks in the village close by, and all over the path hundreds of beetles, real live scarabs, black as coal and busy as ants, rolling their clay pellets up from the water's edge to the desert. If we were to examine a score or so of these pellets, we should hear in there find one that contained no eggs, for it is a curious fact that the scarab beetle makes and rolls her pellets whether she has an egg to deposit or not. The female beetle, though assisted by the male, is said to do the heavier share of the pellet rolling, and if evening comes on before her pellet is safely stowed away, she will sleep holding it with her feet all night, and resume her labor in the morning. The temple here, begun by an Ethiopian king named Archimonde Ergamemnes, about whom Diodorus has a long story to tell, and carried on by the Ptolemies and Caesars, stands in a desolate open space to the north of the village, and is approached by an avenue, the walls of which are constructed with blocks from some other earlier building. The whole of this avenue and all the waste ground for three or four hundred yards around the temple is not merely strewn but piled with fragments of pottery, pebbles, and large smooth stones of fulphurix, alabaster, basalt, and a kind of marble, like Verdi Antico. These stones are puzzling. They look as if they might be fragments of statues that had been rolled and polished by ages of friction in the bed of a torrent. Among the pot-shirts we find some inscribed fragments, like those of Elephantine. Of the temple I will only say that, as masonry, it is better put together than any work of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasties with which I am acquainted. The sculptures, however, are atrocious. Such misshapen hieroglyphs, such dumpy smirking goddesses, such clownish kings in such preposterous head-dressings we have never seen till now. The whole thing, in short, as regards sculpturesque style, is the Ptolemaic out Ptolemaid. Going round presently to Caban, the river running wide with the sand island in between, we land under the walls of a huge crude-brick structure, black with age, which at first sight looks quite shapeless, but which proves to be an ancient Egyptian fortress, buttressed, towered, loop-hold, finished at the angles with invariable molded torus, and surrounded by a deep dry moat, which is probably yet filled each summer by the inundation. Now of all rare things in the valley of the Nile, a purely secular ruin is the rarest, and this, with the exception of some foundations of dwellings here and there, is the first we have seen. It is probably very, very old, as old as the days of Tutmas III, whose name is found on some scattered blocks about a quarter of a mile away, and who built two similar fortresses at Semna thirty-five miles above Wadi-Halfa. It may be a thousand years older still, and date from the time at Amenham-Hot III, whose name is also found on Estella near Caban. For here was once an ancient city, when Pelsix, now Dhaka, was but a new suburb on the opposite bank. The name of this ancient city is lost, but it is by some supposed to be identical with the Metacompso of Ptolemy. As the suburb grew the mother-town declined, and in time the suburb became the city, and the city became the suburb. The scattered blocks aforesaid, together with the remains of a small temple, yet marked the position of the elder city. The walls of this most curious and interesting fortress have probably lost much of their original height. They are in some parts thirty feet thick, and nowhere less than twenty. They are built at a buttress slope outside, with additional shallow buttresses at regular distances. These last, as they can scarcely add to the enormous strength of the original wall, were probably designed for effect. There are two entrances to the fortress, one in the center of the north wall and one in the south. We enter the enclosure by the last named, and find ourselves in the midst of an immense parallelogram, measuring about four hundred and fifty feet from east to west, and perhaps three hundred feet from north to south. All within these bounds is a wilderness of ruin. The space looks large enough for a city, and contains what might be the debris of a dozen cities. We climb huge mounds of rubbish, skirt cataracts of broken pottery, and stand on the brink of excavated pits, honeycombed forty feet below with brick foundations. Over these mounds and at the bottom of these pits were men, women, and children filling and carrying away basket loads of rubble. The dust rises in clouds. The noise, the heat, the confusion are indescribable. One pauses bewildered, seeking in vain to discover in this mighty maze any indication of a plan. It is only by an effort that one gradually realizes how the place is but a vast shell, and how all these mounds and pits mark the sight of what was once a huge edifice rising tower above tower to a central keep, such as we see represented on the battle subjects of Abu Simbel and Thebes. That towered edifice and central keep, quarried, broken up, carried away piecemeal, reduced to powder, and spread over the land as manure, has now disappeared almost to its foundations. Only the well in the middle of the enclosure and the great wall of circuit remain. That wall is doomed, and will by and by share the fate of the rest. The well, which must have been very deep, is choked with rubbish to the brim. Meanwhile in order to realize what the place in its present condition is like, one need but imagine how the tower of London would look if the whole of the inner buildings, white tower, chapel, armory, governor's quarters and all, were leveled in shapeless ruin and only the outer walls and moat were left. Built up against the inner side of the wall of circuit are the remains of a series of massive towers, the tops of which, as they are strangely enough shorter than the external structure, can never have communicated with the battlements unless by ladders. The finest of these towers, together with the magnificent fragment of wall, faces the eastern desert. Going out by the north entrance we find the sides of the gateway and even the steps leading down into the moat in perfect preservation. While at the base of the great wall on the outer side facing the river, there yet remains a channel or conduit about two feet square, built and roofed with stone which in Murray is described as a water-gate. The sun is high, the heat is overwhelming, the falooka waits, and we turn reluctantly away, knowing that between here and Cairo we shall see no more curious relic of the far-off past than this dismantled stronghold. It is a mere mountain of unburnt brick, all together unlovely, admirable only for the gigantic strength of its proportions, pathetic only in the abjectness of its ruin. Yet it brings the lost ages home to one's imagination in a way that no temple ever could bring them. It dispels for a moment the historic glamour of the sculptures, and compels us to remember those nameless and forgotten millions of whom their rulers fashioned soldiers in times of war and builders in time of peace. Our adventures, by the way, are few and far between, and now we rarely meet a Dahabia. Birds are more plentiful than when we were in this part of the river a few weeks ago. We see immense flights of black and white cranes congregated at night on the sandbanks, and any number of quail may be had for the shooting. It is a matter for rejoicing when the idle man goes out with his gun and brings home a full bag, for our last sheep was killed before we started for Wadi-Halfa, and our last poultry ceased cackling at Abu Simbel. One morning early we see a bride taken across the river in a big boat full of women and girls, who are clapping their hands and shrilling the tremendous zagerete. The bride, a chocolate beauty with magnificent eyes, wears a gold brow pendant and nose ring, and has her hair newly plaited in hundreds of tails, finished off at the yens with mud pellets dobbled with yellow ochre. She stands surrounded by her companions, proud of her finery and pleased to be stared at by the Inglaza. About this time also we see one night a wild sort of festival going on for some miles along both sides of the river. Watch fires break out towards twilight, first on this bank, then on that, becoming brighter and more numerous as the darkness deepens. By and by when we are going to bed we hear sounds of drumming on the eastern bank, and see from afar a torchlight of procession and dance. The effect of this dance of torches, for it is only the torches that are visible, is quite diabolic. The lights flit and leap as if they were alive, circling, clustering, dispersing, bobbing, pussetting, pursuing each other at a gallop, and whirling every now and then through the air like rockets. Late as it is we would feign put ashore and see this orgy more nearly, but Rais Hassan shakes his head. The natives hereabout are said to be quarrelsome, and if, as it is probable, they are celebrating the festival of some local saint, we might be treated as intruders. Coming at early morning to Gerf Hassan we make our way up to the temple, which is excavated in the face of a limestone cliff, a couple of hundred feet perhaps above the river. A steep path glaring hot in the sun leads to a terrace in the rock, the temple being approached through the ruins of a built-out portico, and an avenue of battered Colossi. It is a gloomy place within, an inferior addition, so to say, of the great temple of Abu Simbel, and of the same date. It consists of a first hall supported by osiride pillars, a second and smaller hall with square columns, a smoke-blackened sanctuary, and two side chambers. The osiride Colossi, which stand twenty feet high without the entablature over their heads, or the pedestal under their feet, are thick-set, bow-legged, and misshapen. Their faces would seem to have been painted black originally, while those of the avenue outside have distinctly Ethiopian features. One seems to detect here, as at Dura and Wadisabua, the work of provincial sculptors, just as at Abu Simbel one recognizes the master-style of the artist of the Theven Ramiseum. The great side chambers at Girf Hussein are infested with bats. These bats are the great side of the place, and have their appointed showmen. We find him waiting for us with an end of tarred rope, which he flings blazing into the pitch-dark doorway. For a moment we see the whole ceiling hung, as it were, with a close fringe of white, filmy-looking pendants. But it is only for a moment. The next instant the creatures are all in motion, dashing out madly in our faces like driven snowflakes. We picked up a dead one afterwards when the rush was over and examined it by the outer daylight, a lovely little creature wide and downy with fine transparent wings and little pink feet, and the prettiest, mousy mouth imaginable. Bordered with dwarf palms, acacias, and henna-bushes, the cliffs between Girf Hussein and Dendur stand out in detached masses, so like ruins that sometimes we can hardly believe they are rocks. At Dendur, when the sun is setting and a delicious gloom is stealing up the valley, we visit a tiny temple on the western bank. It stands out above the river, surrounded by a wall of enclosure and consists of a single pylon, a portico, two little chambers, and a sanctuary. The whole thing is like an exquisite toy, so covered with sculptures, so smooth, so new looking, so admirably built. Seeing them half by sunset, half by dusk, it matters not that these delicately wrought barreliefs are of the decadence school. The rosy half-light of an Egyptian afterglow covers a multitude of sins, and steeps the whole in an atmosphere of romance. Wondering what has happened to the climate, we wake shivering next morning an hour or so before break of day, and for the first time in several weeks taste the old, early chill upon the air. When the sun rises, we find ourselves at Kalebsha, having passed the limit of the tropic during the night. Henceforth, no matter how great the heat may be by day, this chill invariably comes with the dark hour before dawn. The usual yelling crowd with the usual beads, baskets, eggs, and pigeons for sale greets us on the shore at Kalebsha. One of the men has a fine old two-handed sword in a shabby blue velvet sheath, for which he asks five Napoleon's. It looks as if it might have belonged to a crusader. Some of the women bring buffalo cream in filthy-looking black skins slung round their waist like girdles. The cream is excellent, but the skin's temper one's enjoyment of the unaccustomed dainty. There is a magnificent temple here, and close by, excavated in the cliff, a rock-cut speos, the local name of which is Bate El-Weli. The sculptures of this famous speos have been more frequently described and engraved than almost any sculptures in Egypt. The procession of Ethiopian tribute-dealers, the assault of the Amorite city, the triumph of Ramesses, are familiar not only to every reader of Wilkinson, but to every visitor passing through the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum. Notwithstanding the castes that have been taken from them, and the ill-treatment to which they have been subjected, by natives and visitors, they are still beautiful. The color of those in the roofless courtyard, though so perfect when Benomi executed his admirable facsimiles, has now almost entirely peeled off. But in the portico and inner chambers it is yet brilliant. An emerald-green Osiris, a crimson Anubis, and an Isis of the brightest chrome-yellow, are astonishingly pure and forcible in quality. As for the flesh-tones of the Anubis, this was, I believe, the only instance I observed of a true crimson in Egyptian pigments. Between the speos of Bate El-Weli and the neighboring temple of Kalebsha there lies about half a mile of hilly pathway and a gulf of fourteen hundred years. Ramesses ushers us into the presence of Augustus, and we pass as it were from an oratory in the great house of Pharaoh to the presence chamber of the Caesars. But if the decorative work in the presence chamber of the Caesars was anything like the decorative work in the temple of Kalebsha, then the taste thereof was of the vilest. Such a masquerade of deities, such striped and spotted and cross-barred robes, such outrageous head-dresses, such crude and violent coloring we have never seen the like of. As for the goddesses, they are godlier than the dancing damsels of Luxor, while the kings balance on their heads diadems compounded of horns, moons, birds, balls, beetles, lotus blossoms, asps, vases, and feathers. The temple, however, is conceived on a grand scale. It is the karnak of Nubia. But it is a karnak that has evidently been visited by a shock of earthquake far more severe than that which shook the mighty pillars of the hippostyle hall and flung down the obelisk of Hatassu. From the river it looks like a huge fortress, but seen from the threshold of the main gateway it is a wilderness of ruin. Fallen blocks, pillars, capitals, and tablatures lie so extravagantly piled that there is not one spot in all those halls and courtyards upon which it is possible to set one's foot on the level of the original pavement. Here again the earthquake seems to have come before the work was completed. There are figures outlined on the walls but never sculpted. Others have been begun, but never finished. You can see where the chisel stopped. You can even detect which was the last mark it made on the surface. One traces here, in fact, the four processes of wall decoration. In some places the space is squared off and ruled by the mechanic. In others the subject is ready drawn within those spaces by the artist. Here the sculptor has carried at a stage further. Yonder, the painter, has begun to color it. More interesting, however, than Aute-Else-Colebsche is the Greek inscription of Silco of Ethiopia. This inscription, made famous by the commentaries of Niebuhr and Latrone, was discovered by Monsieur Ga in 1818. It consists of twenty-one lines very neatly written in red ink, and it dates from the sixth century of the Christian era. It commences thus. I, Silco, pucent king of the Nubians and all the Ethiopians. I came twice as far as Talmas and Tafas. I fought against the blames, and God granted me the victory. I vanquished them a second time, and the first time I established myself completely with my troops. I vanquished them, and they supplicated me. I made peace with them, and they swore to me by their idols. I trusted them, because they are a people of good faith. Then I returned to my dominions in the upper country, for I am a king. Not only am I no follower in the train of other kings, but I go before them. As for those who seek strife against me, I give them no peace in their homes till they entreat my pardon. For I am a lion on the plains, and a goat upon the mountains, etc., etc., etc. The historical value of this inscription is very great. It shows that in the sixth century, while the native inhabitants of this part of the Valley of the Nile yet adhered to the ancient Egyptian faith, the Ethiopians of the South were professedly Christian. The descendants of the Blemus are a fine race, tall, strong, and of a rich chocolate complexion. Strolling through the village at sunset we see the entire population, old men sitting at their doors, young men lounging and smoking, children at play, the women with glittering white teeth and liquid eyes, and a profusion of gold and silver ornaments on neck and brow, come out with their little brown babies astride on hip or shoulder to stare as we go by. One sick old woman lying outside her hut on a palm-wood couch raises herself for a moment on her elbow, then sinks back with a weary sigh and turns her face to the wall. The mud dwellings here are built in and out of a maze of massive stone foundations, the remains of a building once magnificent. Some of these walls are built in concave courses, each course of stones, that is to say, being depressed in the center and raised at the angles, which mode of construction was adopted in order to offer less resistance when shaken by earthquakes. We observe more foundations built thus at Taffa where we arrive next morning. As the masons work at Taffa is of late Roman date, it follows that earthquakes were yet frequent in Nubia at a period long subsequent to the great shock of B.C. 27, mentioned by Eusebius. Travelers are too ready to ascribe everything in the way of ruin to the fury of Cambysus and the pious rage of the early Christians. Nothing, however, is easier than to distinguish between the damage done to the monuments by the hand of man and the damage caused by subterraneous upheaval. Mutilation is the rule in one case, displacement in the other. At Dendera, for example, the injury done is wholly willful. At Abu-Simbal it is wholly accidental. At Karnak it is both willful and accidental. As for Kalebsha it is clear that no such tremendous habit could have been affected by human means without the aid of powerful rams, fire or gunpowder, any of which must have left unmistakable traces. At Taffa there are two little temples, one in picturesque ruin, one quite perfect, and now used as a stable. There are also a number of stone foundations, separate, quadrangular, subdivided into numerous small chambers, and enclosed in boundary walls, some of which are built on the concave courses just named. These sub-structures, of which the painter counted eighteen, have long been the puzzle of travellers. CHAPTER XIX Taffa is charmingly placed, and the seven miles which divided from Kalebsha, once no doubt the scene of a cataract, are perhaps the most picturesque on this side of Wadi-Halfa. Rocky islets in the river, palm groves, acacias, carabs, henna and castorberry bushes, and all kinds of flowering shrubs along the edges of the banks, fantastic precipices, ribbon and pinnacled, here rising abruptly from the water's edge, and there from the sandy plain, make lovely sketches whichever way one turns. There are gazelles, it is said, in the ravines behind Taffa, and one of the natives, a truculent fellow in a ragged shirt and dirty white turban, tells how, at a distance of three hours up a certain glen, there is another berba larger than either of these in the plain, and a great standing statue taller than three men. Here then, if the tale be true, is another ready-made discovery for whoever may care to undertake it. This same native, having sold a necklace to the idle man and gone away content with his bargain, comes back by and by with half the village at his heels, requiring double price. This modest demand being refused, he rages up and down like a maniac, tears off his turban, goes through a wild manual exercise with his spear, then sits down in stately silence with his friends and neighbors drawn up in a semi-circle behind him. This, it seems, is nubian for a challenge. He has thrown down his gauntlet in form and demands trial by combat. The noisy crowd, meanwhile, increases every moment. Rais Hassan looks grave, fearing a possible fracas, and the idle man who is reading the morning service down below, for it is on a Sunday morning, can scarcely be heard for the clamour outside. In this emergency it occurs to the writer to send a message ashore informing these gentlemen that the Hawajis are holding a mosque in the Dahabia, and in treating them to be quiet till the hour of prayer is passed. The effect of the message, strange to say, is instantaneous. The angry voices are at once hushed. The challenger puts on his turban. The assembled spectator squat in respectful silence on the bank. A whole hour goes by thus, giving the storm time to blow over, and when the idle man reappears on deck, his would-be adversary comes forward quite pleasantly to discuss the purchase afresh. It matters little how the affair ended, but I believe he was offered his necklace back in exchange for the money paid, and preferred to abide by his bargain. It is, as evidence of the sincerity of the religious sentiment in the minds of a semi-savage people, that I have thought the incident worth telling. We are now less than forty miles from Filet, but the headwind is always against us, and the men's bread is exhausted, and there is no flour to be bought in these newbiean villages. The poor fellows swept out the last crumbs from the bottom of their bread-chest three or four days ago, and are now living on quarter-rations of lentil soup in a few dried dates bought at Wattie Healtha. Patient and depressed they crouch silently beside their oars or forget their hunger and sleep. For ourselves it is painful to witness their need, and still more painful to be unable to help them. Ptolemy, whose own stores are at a low ebb, vows he can do nothing. It would take his few remaining tins of preserved meat to feed fifteen men for two days, and of flour he has barely enough for the huwajis. Hungry, well, yes, no doubt they are hungry, but what of that? They are Arabs, and Arabs bear hunger as camels bear thirst. It is nothing new to them. They have often been hungry before. They will often be hungry again. Enough! It is not for the ladies to trouble themselves about such fellows as these. Excellent advice, no doubt, but hard to follow. Not to be troubled, and not to do what little we can do for the poor lads is impossible. In that little means laying violent hands on Ptolemy's reserve of eggs and biscuits, and getting up lotteries for prizes of chocolate and tobacco, that worthy evidently considers that we have taken leave of our wits. Under a burning sky we touch for an hour or two at Gertassie, and then push on for Daboud. The limestone quarries at Gertassie are full of votive sculptures and inscriptions, and the little ruin, a mere cluster of graceful columns supporting a fragment of cornice, stands high on the brink of a cliff overhanging the river. Take it, as you will, from above or below looking north or looking south, it makes a charming sketch. If transported to Daboud on that magic carpet of the fairy tale, one would take it for a ruin on the beached margin of some placid lake in dreamland. It lies between two bends of the river which here flows wide, showing no outlet and seeming to be girdled by mountains and palm groves. The temple is small and uninteresting, begun like Dhaka by an Ethiopian king and finished by Ptolemy's and Caesar's. The one curious thing about it is a secret cell, most cunningly devised. Adjoining the sanctuary is a dark side chamber, in the floor of the side chamber is a pit. Once paved over, in one corner of the pit is a manhole opening into a narrow passage, and in the narrow passage are steps leading up to a secret chamber constructed in the thickness of the wall. We saw other secret chambers in other temples, but not one in which the old approaches were so perfectly preserved. From Daboud to Philae is but ten miles, and we are bound for Toregar, which is two miles nearer. Now Toregar is that same village at the foot of the beautiful sand-drift near which we moored on our way up the river, and here we are to stay two days, followed by at least a week at Philae. No sooner, therefore, have we reached Toregar than Raisa Hasan and three sailors start for Aswan to buy flour. Old Ali, Riskali, and Musa, whose homes lie in the villages round about, get leave of absence for a week, and we find ourselves reduced all at once to a crew of five, with only Khalifa in command. Five, however, are as good as fifty when the Dahabia lies moored and there is nothing to do, and our five, having succeeded in buying some flabby Nubian cakes and green lentils, are now quite happy. So the painter sketches the ruined convent opposite, and El and the little lady write no end of letters, and the idle man with Mohammed Ali for a retriever shoots quail, and everybody is satisfied. Hapless idle man, hapless but homicidal, if he had been content to shoot only quail and had not taken to shooting babies. What possessed him to do it? Not let us hope an ill-directed ambition foiled of crocodiles. He went serene and smiling with his gun under his arm, and Mohammed Ali in his wake. Whoso light of heart as that idle man? Whoso light of heel as that turbaned retriever? We heard our sportsman popping away presently in the barley. It was a pleasant sound, for we knew his aim was true. Every shot, said we, means a bird. We little dreamed that one of those shots meant a baby. All at once a woman screamed. It was a sharp sudden scream following a shot, a scream with a ring of horror in it. Instantly it was caught up from point to point, growing in volume and seeming to be echoed from every direction at once. At the same moment the bank became alive with human beings. They seemed to spring from the soil, women shrieking and waving their arms, men running, all making for the same goal. The writer heard the scream, saw the rush, and knew at once that a gun accident had happened. A few minutes of painful suspense followed. Then Mohammed Ali appeared, tearing back at the top of his speed, and presently, perhaps five minutes later, though it seemed like twenty, came the idle man walking very slowly and defiantly, with his head up, his arms folded, his gun gone, and an immense rabble at his heels. Our scanty crew, armed with sticks, flew at once to the rescue and brought him off in safety. We then learned what had happened. A flight of quail had risen, and as quail fly low, skimming the surface of the grain and diving down again almost immediately, he had taken level aim. At the instant that he fired and in the very path of the quail a woman and child who had been squatting in the barley, spraying up, screaming. He at once saw the coming danger and with admirable presence of mind drew the charge of his second barrel. He then hit his cartridge box and hugged his gun, determined to hold it as long as possible. The next moment he was surrounded, overpowered, had the gun wrenched from his grasp, and received a blow on the back with a stone. Then captured the gun one or two of the men let go. It was then that he shook off the rest and came back to the boat. Mohammed Ali at the same time flew to call a rescue. He too came in for some hard knocks, besides having his shirt rent and his turban torn off his head. Here were we, meanwhile, with less than half our crew, a private war on our hands, no captain, and one of our three guns in the hands of the enemy. What a scene it was! A whole village, apparently a very considerable village, swarming on the bank, all hurrying to and fro, all raving, shouting, gesticulating. If we had been on the verge of a fracas at Taffa, here we were threatened with a siege. Drawing in the plank between the boat and the shore we held a hasty council of war. The woman being unhurt, and the child, if hurt at all, hurt very slightly, we felt justified in assuming an injured tone, calling the village to account for a case of cowardly assault, and demanding instant restitution of the gun. We accordingly sent Ptolemy to parley with the headman of the place, and peremptorily demand the gun. We also bad him add, and this we regarded as a master stroke of policy, that if due submission was immediately made, the Hawaji, one of whom was a hakeem, would permit the father to bring his child on board and have its hurts attended to. The indifferent, inwardly not a little anxious, we waited the event. Ptolemy's back being towards the river we had the whole semi-circle of swarthy faces full in view, bent brows, flashing eyes, glittering teeth, all anger, all scorn, all defiance. Suddenly the expression of the faces changed, the change beginning with those nearest the speaker and spreading gradually outwards. It was as if a wave had passed over them. We knew then that our coup was made. Ptolemy returned. The villagers crowded round their leaders, deliberating. Numbers now began to sit down, and when a newbien sits down you may be sure that he is no longer dangerous. Presently, after perhaps a quarter of an hour, the gun was brought back uninjured, and an elderly man carrying a blue bundle appeared on the bank. The plank was now put across, the crowd was kept off, and the man with the bundle and three or four others were allowed to pass. The bundle being undone a little brown imp of about four years of age, with a shaven head and shaggy scalp lock was produced. He whimpered at first, seeing the strange white faces, but when offered a fig forgot his terrors and sat munching it like a monkey. As for his wounds they were literally skin deep. The shot having but slightly grazed his shoulders in four or five places. The idle man, however, solemnly sponged the scratches with warm water, and El covered them with patches of sticking plaster. Finally the father was presented with a Napoleon, the patient was wrapped in one of his murderer's shirts, and the first act of the tragedy ended. The second and third acts were to come. When the painter and the idle man talked the affair over, they agreed that it was expedient for the protection of future travellers to lodge a complaint against the village, and this mainly on account of the treacherous blow dealt from behind, at a time when the idle man, who had not once attempted to defend himself, was powerless in the hands of a mob. They therefore went next day to Aswan, and the Governor, charming as ever, promised that justice should be done. Meanwhile, we moved to the Dahabiette Filet and there settled down for a week's sketching. Next evening came a woeful deputation from Torreger in treating forgiveness and stating that fifteen villagers had been swept off to prison. The idle man explained that he no longer had anything to do with it, that the matter, in short, was in the hands of justice, and would be dealt with according to law. Hereupon the spokesman gathered up a handful of imaginary dust, and made believe to scatter it on his head. O Drago-man, he said, tell the Hawaji that there is no law but his pleasure, and no justice but the will of the Governor. Summoned next morning to give evidence the idle man went betimes to Aswan, where he was received in private by the Governor and Mütter. Pipes and coffee were handed, and the usual civilities exchanged. The Governor then informed his guests that fifteen men of Torreger had been arrested, and that fourteen of them unanimously identified the fifteenth as the one who struck the blow. And now, said the Governor, before we send for the prisoners, it will be as well to decide on the sentence. What does his excellency wish done to them? The idle man was puzzled. How could he offer an opinion, being ignorant of the Egyptian civil code? And how could the sentence be decided upon before the trial? The Governor smiled serenely. But, he said, this is the trial. Being an Englishman it necessarily cost the idle man an effort to realize the full force of this explanation. An explanation which, in its sublime simplicity, epitomized the whole system of the judicial administration of Egyptian law. He hastened, however, to explain that he cherished no resentment against the culprit or the villagers, and that his only wish was to frighten them into a due respect for travelers in general. The Governor hereupon invited the mutter to suggest a sentence, and the mutter, taking into consideration, as he said, his excellency's lenient disposition, proposed to award to the fourteen innocent men one month's imprisonment each, and to the real offender two months' imprisonment with a hundred and fifty blows of the bastionado. Shocked at the mere idea of such a sentence, the idle man declared that he must have the innocent set at liberty, but consented that the culprit, for the sake of example, should be sentenced to the one hundred and fifty blows. The punishment to be remitted after the first few strokes had been dealt. Word was now given for the prisoners to be brought in. The jailer marched first, followed by two soldiers. Then came the fifteen prisoners, I am ashamed to write it, chained neck to neck in single file. One can imagine how the idle man felt at this moment. This being pronounced, the fourteen looked as if they could hardly believe their ears, while the fifteenth, though condemned to one hundred and fifty strokes, seventy-five to each foot, specified the governor, was overjoyed to be let off so easily. He was then flung down, his feet were fastened, souls uppermost, and two soldiers proceeded to execute the sentence. As each blow fell he cried, God save the governor, God save the mutter, God save the huwaji. When the sixth stroke had been dealt the idle man turned to the governor and formally interceded for the remission of the rest of the sentence. The governor, as formally granted the request, and the prisoners weeping for joy were set at liberty. The governor, the mutter, and the idle man then parted with a profusion of compliments, the governor protesting that his only wish was to be agreeable to the English, and that the whole village should have been bastionadoed had his excellency desired it. We spent eight enchanting days at Filet, and it so happened, when the afternoon of the eighth came round, that for the last few hours the rider was alone on the island. Alone that is to say, with only a sailor in attendance, which was virtual solitude, and Filet is a place to which solitude adds an inexpressible touch of pathos and remoteness. It has been a hot day, and there is dead calm on the river. My last sketch finished I wander slowly round from spot to spot, saying farewell to Farrah's bed, to the painted columns, to every terrace and palm and shrine, and familiar point of view. I peep once again into the mystic chamber of Osiris. I see the sunset for the last time from the roof of the temple of Isis. Then when all that wondrous flush of rose and gold has died away comes the warm afterglow. No words can paint the melancholy beauty of Filet at this hour. The surrounding mountains stand out jagged and purple against a pale amber sky. The Nile is glassy. Not a breath, not a bubble, troubles the inverted landscape. Every palm is twofold, every stone is doubled. The big boulders in midstream are reflected so perfectly that it is impossible to tell where the rock ends and the water begins. The temples, meanwhile, have turned to a subdued golden bronze and the pylons are peepled with shapes that glow with fantastic life and look ready to step down from their places. The solitude is perfect and there is a magical stillness in the air. I hear a mother crooning to her baby on the neighboring island, a sparrow twittering in its little nest in the capital of a column below my feet, a vulture screaming plaintively among the rocks in the far distance. I look, I listen, I promise myself that I will remember it all in years to come. All the solemn hills, these silent colonnades, these deep, quiet spaces of shadow, these sleeping palms. Lingering till it is all but dark, I last bid them farewell, fearing lest I may behold them no more.