 A THOUSAND MILES UP THE NILE, SECTION 33. Mahata, green with sycamores and tufted palms, nestled in the hollow of a little bay, half islanded in the rear by an arm of backwater, curved and glittering like the blade of a Turkish scimitar, is by far the most beautifully situated village on the Nile. It is the residence of the principal shake, and, if one may say so, is the capital of the cataract. The houses lie some way back from the river. The bay is thronged with native boats of all sizes and colors. Men and camels, women and children, donkeys, dogs, merchandise, and temporary huts put together with poles and matting, crowd the sandy shore. It is Aswan over again, but on a larger scale. The shipping is tenfold more numerous. The trader's camp is in itself a village. The beach is half a mile in length, and a quarter of a mile in the slope down to the river. Mahata is, in fact, the twin port to Aswan. It lies not precisely at the other extremity of the Great Valley between Aswan and Filet, but at the nearest accessible point above the cataract. It is here that the Sudan traders disembark their goods for re-embarcation at Aswan. Barbaric-looking craft is these Nubian Kangyas we had not yet seen on the river. They looked as old and obsolete as the ark. Some had curious carved verandas outside the cabin entrance. Others were tilted up at the stern like Chinese junks. Most of them had been slavers in the palmy days of Defdeirter Bay, plying then as now between Wadi Halfa and Mahata, discharging their human cargoes at this point for reshipment at Aswan, and rarely passing the cataract even at the time of inundation. If their wicked old timbers could have spoken they might have told us many a black and bloody tale. Going up through the village and the palm gardens and turning off in a northeasterly direction towards the desert. One presently comes out about midway of that valley to which I have made illusion more than once already. No one, however unskilled in physical geography, could look from end to end of that huge furrow and not see that it was once a river-bed. We know not for how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years the Nile may have held on its course within those original bounds. Neither can we tell when it deserted them. It is, however, quite certain that the river flowed that way within historic times. This is to say, in the days of Amenem Haat III, circa B.C. 2800. So much is held to be proven by certain inscriptions which record the maximum height of the inundation at Sena during various years of that king's reign. The Nile then rose in Ethiopia to a level some twenty-seven feet in excess of the highest point to which it is ever known to attain at the present day. I am not aware what relation the height of this ancient bed bears to the levels recorded at Sena, or to those now annually self-registered upon the furrowed banks of Phile. But one sees at a glance, without aid of measurements, or hydrographic science, that if the river were to come down again next summer in a mighty bore, the crest of which rose twenty-seven feet above the highest ground now fertilized by the annual overflow, it would at once refill its long-deserted bed and convert Aswan into an island. Granted then that the Nile flowed through the desert in the time of Amenem Haat III, there must at some later period have come a day when it suddenly ran dry. This catastrophe is supposed to have taken place about the time of the expulsion of the Hixos, circa B.C. 1703, when a great disruption of the rocky barrier at Silcilis is thought to have taken place. No draining Nubia, which till now had played the part of a vast reservoir, and dispersing the pent-up floods over the plains of southern Egypt. It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that the Nile was by this catastrophe turned aside in order to be precipitated in the direction of the cataract. One arm of the river must always have taken the present lower and deeper course, while the other must have necessity of run low, perhaps very nearly dry, as the inundation subsided every spring. There remains no monumental record of this event, but the facts speak for themselves. The Great Channel is there. The old Nile mud is there, buried for the most part in sand, but still visible on many Iraqi shelf and plateau between Aswan and Filet. There are even places where the surface of the mass is seen to be scooped out as if by the sudden rush of the departing waves. Since that time the tides of war and commerce have flowed in their place. Pre-conquering Tutmos and Ramesses bound for the land of Kush led his armies that way. Sabacon, at the head of his Ethiopian hordes, took that short cut to the throne of all the Pharaohs. The French under Desseilles, pursuing the memelux after the battle of the pyramids, swept down that pass to Filet. Meanwhile, the whole trade of the Sudan, however interrupted at times by the ebb and flow of war, has also set that way. We never crossed those five miles of desert without encountering a train or two of baggage camels laden either with the European goods for the far south or with oriental treasures for the north. I shall not soon forget an Abyssinian caravan which we met one day, just coming out from Mahata. It consisted of seventy camels laden with elephant tusks. The tusks, which were about fourteen feet in length, were packed in half dozens and sewn up in buffalo hides. Each camel was slung with two loads, one at either side of the hump. There must have been about eight hundred and forty tusks in all. Beside each shambling beast trod a bare-footed nubian. Following these, on the back of a gigantic camel came a hunting leopard in a wooden cage and a wild cat in a basket. Last of all marched a coal-black Abyssinian nearly seven feet in height, jointly shawl'd and turban'd, with a huge scimitar dangling by his side, and in his belt a pair of enormous, inlaid, seventeenth-century pistols such as would have become the holsters of Prince Rupert. This elaborate warrior represented the guard of the caravan. The hunting leopard and the wild cat were for Prince Hassan, the third son of the viceroy. The ivory was for exportation. Anything more picturesque than this procession, with the dust driving before it in clouds and the children following it out of the village, would be difficult to conceive. One long'd for Gérôme to paint it on the spot. The rocks on either side of the ancient riverbed are profusely hieroglyphed. These inscriptions, together with others found in the adjacent quarries, range over a period of between three and four thousand years, beginning with the early reigns of the ancient empire and ending with the Ptolemies and Caesars. Some are mere autographs. Others run to a considerable length. Many are headed with figures of gods and worshipers. These, however, are for the most part mere graffiti, ill-drawn and carelessly sculptured. The records they illustrate are chiefly votive. The passerby adores the gods of the cataracts, implores their protection, registers his name, and states the object of his journey. The votaries are of various ranks, periods, and nationalities, but the formula, in most instances, is pretty much the same. Now it is a citizen of thieves performing the pilgrimage to Phile, or a general at the head of his troops returning from a foray to Ethiopia, or a tributary prince doing homage to Ramesses the Great and associating his Suzaran with the divinities of the place. Occasionally we come upon a royal cartouche and a pompous catalogue of titles, setting forth how the Pharaoh himself, the golden hawk, the son of Ra, the mighty, the invincible, the godlike, passed that way. It is curious to see how royalty so many thousand years ago set the fashion in names just as it does to this day. Nine-tenths of the ancient travelers who left their signatures upon these rocks were called Ramesses or Tutmus or Yusuf Tussan. Others still more ambitious took the names of the gods. Professor, who hunted diligently for inscriptions both here and among the islands, found the autographs of no end of merely mortal amons and hathors. Our three days' detention in the cataract was followed by a fourth of glassy calm. There being no breath of air to fill our sails and no footing for the trackers, we could now get along only by dint of hard punting, so that it was past midday before the Phile lay moored at last in the shadow of the holy island to which she owed her name. END OF SECHTION XXXIII. Even been for so many days within easy reach of Phile, it is not to be supposed that we were content till now with only an occasional glimpse of its towers in the distance. On the contrary, we had found our way thither towards the close of almost every day's excursion. We had approached it by land from the desert, by water in the faluca, from Mahada by way of the path between the cliffs and the river. When I add that we moored here for a night and the best part of two days on our way up the river, and again for a week when we came down, it will be seen that we had time to learn the lovely island by heart. The approach by water is quite the most beautiful. Seen from the level of a small boat, the island with its palms, its colonnades, its pylons, seems to rise out of the river like a mirage. Piled rocks frame it in on either side, and purple mountains close up the distance. As the boat glides nearer between glistening boulders, all sculptured towers rise higher and ever higher against the sky. They show no sign of ruin or age. All look solid, stately, perfect. One forgets for the moment that anything is changed. If a sound of antique chanting were to be borne along the quiet air, if a procession of white-robed priests bearing aloft the veiled ark of the god were to come sweeping round between the palms and the pylons, we should not think it strange. Most travelers land at the end nearest the cataract, so coming upon the principal temple from behind and seeing it in reverse order. We, however, bid our Arabs row round to the southern end, where was once a stately landing-place with steps down to the river. We skirt the steep banks and pass close under the beautiful little roofless temple commonly known as Pharaoh's Bed. A temple which has been so often painted, so often photographed, that every stone of it and the platform on which it stands, and the tufted palms that cluster it, have been since childhood as familiar to our mind's eye as the sphinx or the pyramids. It is larger, but not one jot less beautiful than we had expected. And it is exactly like the photographs. Still, one is conscious of perceiving a shade of difference too subtle for analysis, like the difference between a familiar face and the reflection of it in a looking-glass. Anyhow one feels that the real Pharaoh's Bed will henceforth displace the photographs in that obscure mental pigeonhole where till now one has been wont to store the well-known image, and that even the photographs have undergone some kind of change. And now the corner is rounded, and the river widens away southwards between mountains and palm groves, and the prow touches the debris of a ruined quay. The bank is steep here. We climb, and a wonderful scene opens before our eyes. We are standing at the lower end of a courtyard leading up to the propylons of the great temple. The courtyard is irregular in shape, and enclosed on either side by covered colonnades. The colonnades are of unequal lengths and set at different angles. One is simply a covered walk. The other opens upon a row of small chambers, like a monastic cloister opening upon a row of cells. The roofing stones of these colonnades are in part displaced, while here and there a pillar or capital is missing. But the twin towers of the propylon, standing out in sharp unbroken lines against the sky and covered with colossal sculptures, are as perfect, or very nearly as perfect, as in the days of the Ptolemies who built them. The broad area between the colonnades is honeycombed with crude brick foundations, vestiges of a Coptic village of early Christian time. Among these we thread our way to the foot of the principal propylon, the entire width of which is 120 feet. The towers measure 60 feet from base to parapet. These dimensions are insignificant for Egypt, yet the propylon, which would look small at Luxor or Karnak, does not look small at Filet. The keynote here is not magnitude but beauty. The island is small, that is to say it covers an area about equal to the summit of the Acropolis at Athens, and the scale of the buildings has been determined by the size of the island. As at Athens the ground is occupied by one principal temple of moderate size, and several subordinate chapels. Perfect grace, exquisite proportion, most varied and capricious grouping, here take the place of massiveness, so lending to Egyptian forms and irregularity of treatment that is almost gothic, and a lightness that is almost Greek. And now we catch glimpses of an inner court, of a second propylon, of a pillared portico beyond. While looking up to the colossal Baugh reliefs above our heads, we see the usual mystic forms of kings and deities, crowned and thrown, worshipping and worshiped. These sculptures, which at first sight looked not less perfect than the towers, proved to be as laboriously mutilated as those of Dendera. The hawkhead of Horus and the cowhead of Hathor have here and there escaped destruction, but the human-faced deities are literally sawns, eyes, sawns-nose, sawns-ears, sawns-everything. We enter the inner court, an irregular quadrangle enclosed on the east by an open colonnade, on the west by a chapel fronted with Hathor-headed columns, and on the north and south sides by the second and first propylons. In this quadrangle a cloistered silence reigns. The blue sky burns above, the shadows sleep below, a tender twilight lies about our feet. Inside the chapel there sleeps perpetual gloom. It was built by Ptolemy or Getty's the second, and is one of that order to which Shampolyon gave the name of Mamisi. It is a most curious place, dedicated to Hathor and commemorative of the nurture of Horus. On the blackened walls within, dimly visible by the faint light which struggles through screen and doorway, we see Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, giving birth to Horus. On the screen panels outside we trace the story of his infancy, education, and growth. As a babe at the breast he is nursed in the lap of Hathor, the divine foster mother. As a young child he stands at his mother's knee and listens to the playing of a female harpist. We saw a bare-footed boy the other day in Cairo, thrumming upon a harp, of just the same shape, and with precisely as many strings. As a youth he sows grains in honor of Isis, and offers a jeweled collar to Hathor. This Isis, with her long, aquiline nose, thin lips, and haughty aspect, looks like one of the complementary portraits so often introduced among the temple sculptures of Egypt. It may represent one of the two Cleopatra's wedded to Ptolemy Fizcon. Two grayhounds with collars round their necks are sculptured on the outer wall of another small chapel adjoining. These also look like portraits. Perhaps they were the favorite dogs of some high priest to filet. Close against the grayhounds and upon the same wall-space is in Graven that famous copy of the inscription of the Rosetta Stone first observed here by Lepceus in A.D. 1843. It neither stands so high nor looks so legible as Ampere, with all the jealousy of a shampolionist and a Frenchman, is at such pains to make out. One would have said that it was in a state of more than ordinarily good preservation. As a reproduction of the Rosetta Decree, however, the filet version is incomplete. The Rosetta text, after setting forth with official pomposity the victories and munificence of the king, Ptolemy V, the ever-living, the Avenger of Egypt, concludes by ordaining that the record thereof shall be in Graven and hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek characters, and set up in all temples of the first, second, and third class throughout the empire. Broken and battered as it is, the precious black basalt of the British Museum fulfills these conditions. The three writings are there. But at Filet, though the original hieroglyphic and Demotic text are reproduced almost verbatim, the priceless Greek transcript is wanting. It is provided for as upon the Rosetta Stone in the preamble. Space has been left for it at the bottom of the tablet. We even fancied we could here and there distinguish traces of red ink where the lines should come. But not one word of it has ever been cut into the surface of the stone. Taken by itself there is nothing strange in this omission. But taken in connection with a precisely similar omission and another inscription a few yards distant, it becomes something more than a coincidence. This second inscription is cut upon the face of a block of living rock which forms part of the foundation of the eastern most tower of the second propylon. Having enumerated certain grants of land made to the temple by the sixth and seventh Ptolemies, it concludes, like the first, by decreeing that this record of the royal bounty shall be engraven in the hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. That is to say, in the ancient sacred writings of the priests, the ordinary script of the people and the language of the court. But here again the sculptor has left his work unfinished. Here again the inscription breaks off at the end of the Demotic, leaving a blank space for the third transcript. This second omission suggests intentional neglect, and the motive for such neglect would not be far to seek. The tongue of the dominant race is likely enough to have been unpopular among the old noble and sacerdotal families, and it may well be that the priesthood of Phile, secure in their distant, solitary isle, could with impunity evade a clause which their brethren of the delta were obliged to obey. It does not follow that the Greek rule was equally unpopular. We have reason to believe quite otherwise. The conqueror of the Persian invader was in truth the deliverer of Egypt. Alexander restored peace to the country, and the Ptolemies identified themselves with the interests of the people. A dynasty which not only lightened the burdens of the poor, but respected the privileges of the rich, which honored the priesthood, endowed the temples, and compelled the tigress to restore the spoils of the Nile, could scarcely fail to win the suffrages of all classes. The priests of Phile might despise the language of Homer while honoring the descendants of Philip of Macedon. They could naturalize the king. They could disguise his name in hieroglyphic spelling. They could depict him in the traditional dress of the pharaohs. They could crown him with a double crown and represent him in the act of worshiping the gods of his adopted country. But they could neither naturalize nor disguise his language. Spoken or written it was an alien thing. Carven in high places it stood for a badge of servitude. What could a conservative hierarchy do but abhor and when possible ignore it? There are other sculptures in this quadrangle which one would like to linger over, as, for instance, the capitals of the eastern colonnade, no two of which are alike, and the grotesque brow-reliefs of the frieze of the Mamisi. Of these, a quasi-heraldic group, representing the sacred hawk sitting in the center of a fan-shaped perjetry between two supporters, is one of the most curious. The supporters being on the one side a maniacal lion, and on the other a typhonian hippopotamus, each grasping a pair of shears. Going now through the doorway of the second propylon we find ourselves facing the portico, the famous painted portico of which we had seen so many sketches that we fancied we knew it already. That second-hand knowledge goes for nothing, however, in presence of the reality, and we are as much taken by surprise as if we were the first travelers to set foot within these enchanted precincts. For here is a place in which time seems to have stood still, as in that immortal palace where everything went to sleep for a hundred years. The ba-reliefs on the walls, the intricate paintings on the ceilings, the colors upon the capitals, are incredibly fresh and perfect. These exquisite capitals have long been the wonder and delight of travelers in Egypt. They are all studied from natural forms, from the lotus in bud and blossom, the papyrus and the palm. Conventionalized with consummate skill, they are at the same time so justly proportioned to the height and girth of the columns as to give an air of wonderful lightness to the whole structure. But above all it is with the color, color conceived in the tender and pathetic minor of watu and loncret and grooves, that one is most fascinated. Of those delicate halftones, the facsimile in the grammar of ornament conveys not the remotest idea. Every tint is softened, intermixed, degraded. The pinks are corolline, the greens are tempered with verdite, the blues are of a greenish turquoise like the western half of an autumnal evening sky. END OF SECHSION 34 A THOUSAND MILES UP THE NILE SECHSION 35 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 XII. Later on when we return to Philae from the Second Cataract, the writer devoted the best part of three days to making a careful study of a corner of this portico, patiently matching those subtle variations of tint and endeavoring to master the secret of their combination. The annexed woodcut can do no more than reproduce the forms. Architecturally this court is unlike any way of yet seen, being quite small and open to the sky in the center, like the atrium of a Roman house. The light thus admitted glows overhead, lies in a square patch on the ground below, and is reflected upon the pictured recesses of the ceiling. At the upper end, where the pillars stand too deep, there was originally an intercolumn or screen. The rough sides of the columns show where the connecting blocks have been torn away. The pavement, too, has been pulled up by treasure-seekers, and the ground is strewn with broken slabs and fragments of shattered cornice. These are the only signs of ruin, signs traced not by the finger of time, but by the hand of the spoiler. So fresh, so fair is all the rest that we are fain to cheat ourselves for a moment into the belief that what we see is work not marred, but arrested. Those columns, depend on it, are yet unfinished. That pavement is about to be relayed. It would not surprise us to find the masons here tomorrow morning, or the sculptor, with mallet and chisel, carrying on that band of lotus buds and bees. Far more difficult it is to believe that they all struck work forever some two and twenty centuries ago. Here and there, where the foundations have been disturbed, one sees that the columns are constructed of sculptured blocks, the fragments of some earlier temple, while at a height of about six feet from the ground a Greek cross cut deep into the side of the shaft stamps upon each pillar the seal of Christian worship. For the cops, who choked the colonnades and courtyards with their hovels, seized also on the temples. Some they pulled down for building material, others they appropriated. We can never know how much they destroyed, but two large convents on the eastern bank a little higher up the river and a small basilica at the north end of the island would seem to have been built with the magnificent masonry of the southern quay, as well as with blocks taken from a structure which once occupied the southeastern corner of the great colonnade. As for this beautiful painted portico, they turned it into a chapel. A little rough hue niche in the east wall and an overturned credence table fashioned from a single block of limestone marked the site of the chancel. The Arabs, taking this last for a gravestone, have pulled it up, according to their usual practice, in search of treasure buried with the dead. On the front of the credence table, and over the niche with some unskilled but pious hand as decorated with rude Byzantine carvings, the Greek cross is again conspicuous. The religious history of Philae is so curious that it is a pity it should not find an historian. It shared with Abidos and some other places the reputation of being the burial place of Osiris. It was called the Holy Island. Its very soil was sacred. None might land upon its shores or even approach them too nearly without permission. To obtain that permission and perform the pilgrimage to the tomb of the god was to the pious Egyptian what the mecca pilgrimage is to the pious Muselmine of today. The most solemn oath to which he could give utterance was by him who sleeps in Philae. When and how the island first came to be regarded as the resting place of the most beloved of the gods does not appear, but its reputation for sanctity seems to have been of comparatively modern date. It probably rose into importance as Abidos declined. Herodotus, who is supposed to have gone as far as Elephantine, made minute inquiry concerning the river above that point, and he relates that the cataract was in the occupation of Ethiopian nomads. He, however, makes no mention of Philae or its temples. This omission on the part of one who, wherever he went, sought the society of the priests and paid particular attention to the religious observances of the country, shows that either Herodotus never got so far, or the island had not yet become the home of the Osirin mysteries. Four hundred years later, Deodorus Sicillus describes it as the holiest of holy places, while Strabo, writing about the same time, relates that Abidos had then dwindled to a mere village. It seems possible, therefore, that at some period subsequent to the time of Herodotus, and prior to that of Deodorus or Strabo, the priests of Isis may have migrated from Abidos to Philae, in which case there would have been a formal transfer not only of the relics of Osiris, but of the sanctity which had attached for ages to their original resting place. Nor is the motive for such an exodus wanting. The ashes of the god were no longer safe at Abidos. Situate in the midst of a rich country on the high road to Thebes, no city south of Memphis lay more exposed to the hazards of war. Cambysus had already passed that way. Other invaders might follow. To seek beyond the frontier that security which might no longer be found in Egypt would seem, therefore, to be the obvious course of a priestly guild devoted to its trust. This, of course, is mere conjecture to be taken for what it may be worth. The decadence of Abidos coincides at all events with the growth of Philae, and it is only by help of some such assumption that one can understand how a new site should have suddenly arisen to such a height of holiness. The earliest temple here, of which only a small propylene remains, would seem to have been built by the last of the native pharaohs, Nectenebo II, B.C. 361, but the high and palmy days of Philae belonged to the period of Greek and Roman rule. It was in the time of the Ptolemies that the holy island became the seat of a sacred college and the stronghold of a powerful hierarchy. Visitors from all parts of Egypt, travelers from distant lands, and functionaries from Alexandria charged with royal gifts, came annually in crowds to offer their vows at the tomb of the god. They have cut their names by hundreds all over the principal temple, just like tourists of today. Some of these antique autographs are written upon and across those of preceding visitors. While others, palimpsests upon stone, so to say, having been scratched on the yet unsculptured surface of doorway and pylon, are seen to be older than the hieroglyphic texts which were afterwards carved over them. These inscriptions cover a period of several centuries, during which time successive Ptolemies and Caesars continued to endow the island. Rich in lands and temples, in the localization of a great national myth, the sacred college was yet strong enough in A.D. 379 to oppose a practical resistance to the edict of Theodosius. At a word from Constantinople the whole land of Egypt was forcibly Christianized. Priests were forbidden under pain of death to perform the sacred rites. Hundreds of temples were plundered. Forty thousand statues of divinities were destroyed at one fell swoop. Meanwhile, the brotherhood of Phile and trenched behind the cataract in the desert, survived the degradation of their order and the ruin of their immemorial faith. It is not known with certainty for how long they continued to transmit the hereditary privileges, but two of the above-mentioned votive inscriptions show that so late as A.D. 453 the priestly families were still in occupation of the island and still celebrating the mysteries of Osiris and Isis. There even seems reason for believing that the ancient worship continued to hold its own till the end of the sixth century, at which time, according to an inscription at Calabshe, of which I shall have more to say hereafter, Silco, king of all the Ethiopians, himself apparently a Christian, twice invaded lower Nubia, where God, he says, gave him the victory and the vanquish swore to him by their idols to observe the terms of peace. There is nothing in this record to show that the invaders went beyond Taffa, the ancient Taffas, which is twenty-seven miles above Phile, but it seems reasonable to conclude that so long as the old gods yet reigned in any part of Nubia, the island's sacred to Osiris would maintain its traditional sanctity. At length, however, there must have come a day when, for the last time, the tomb of the god was crowned with flowers, and the lamentations of Isis were recited on the threshold of the cemetery. And there must have come another day when the cross was carried in triumph of those painted colonnades, and the first Christian mass was chanted in the precincts of the heathen. One would like to know how these changes were brought about, whether the old faith died out for want of worshipers, or was expelled with clamor and violence. But upon this point history is vague, and the graffiti of the time are silent. We only know for certain that the old went out and the new came in, and that where the resurrected Osiris was want to be worshiped according to the most sacred mysteries of the Egyptian ritual, the resurrected Christ was now adored after the simple fashion of the primitive Coptic church. And now the holy island, near which it was believed no fish had power to swim or bird to fly, and upon whose soil no pilgrim might set foot without permission, became all at once the common property of a populist community. Courts, colonnades, even terraced roofs were overrun with little crude brick dwellings. A small basilica was built at the lower end of the island. The portico of the great temple was converted into a chapel and dedicated to St. Stephen. This good work, says a Greek inscription traced there by some monkish hand of the period, was done by the well-beloved of God the Abbot Bishop Theodore. Of this same Theodore, whom another inscription styles the very holy father, we know nothing but his name. The walls hereabout are full of these fugitive records. The cross has conquered, and will ever conquer, writes one anonymous scribe. Others have left simple signatures, as, for instance, I Joseph, in one place, and I Theodosius of Nubia in another. Here and there an added word or two give a more human interest to the autograph. So in the pathetic scrawl of one who writes himself, Johannes, a slave, we seem to read the history of a life in a single line. These Coptic signatures are all followed by the sign of the cross. The foundations of the little basilica, with its apps toward the east and its two doorways to the west, are still traceable. We set a couple of our sailors one day to clear away the rubbish at the lower end of the nave, and found the front, a rough stone basin at the foot of a broken column. It is not difficult to guess what Phile must have been like in the days of Abbot Theodore and his flock. The little basilica, we may be sure, had a cluster of mud domes upon the roof, and I fancy somehow that the Abbot and his monks installed themselves in that row of cells on the east side of the great colonnade, where the priests of Isis dwelt before them. As for the village, it must have been just like Luxor, swarming with dusky life, noisy with the babble of children, the cackling of poultry and the barking of dogs, sending up thin pillars of blue smoke at noon, echoing to the measured chime of the prayer bell at morn and even, and sleeping at night as soundly as if no ghost-like mutilated gods were looking on mournfully in the moonlight. The gods are avenged now. The creed which dethroned them is dethroned. Abbot Theodore and his successors, and the religion they taught, and the simple folk that listened to their teaching, are gone and forgotten. For the Church of Christ, which still languishes in Egypt, is extinct in Nubia. It lingered long, though doubtless in some such degraded and barbaric form as it wears in Abyssinia to this day. But it was absorbed by Islamism at last, and only a ruined convent perched here and there upon some solitary height, or a few crosses rudely carved on the walls of a Ptolemaic temple, remained to show that Christianity once passed that way. CHAPTER XII. FILE. The medieval history of File is almost a blank. The Arabs, having invaded Egypt towards the middle of the seventh century, were long in the land before they began to cultivate literature, and for more than three hundred years history is silent. It is not till the tenth century that we once again catch a fleeting glimpse of File. The frontier is now removed to the head of the cataract. The holy island has ceased to be Christian, ceased to be Nubian, contains a mosque and garrison, and is the last fortified outpost of the Muslims. It still retains and apparently continues to retain for some centuries longer its ancient Egyptian name. That is to say, P. Becoming as usual converted into B., the Pilaq of the hieroglyphic inscriptions becomes an Arabic Belaq, which is much more like the original than the File of the Greeks. The native Christians, meanwhile, would seem to have relapsed into a state of semi-barbarism. They make perpetual inroads upon the Arab frontier and suffer perpetual defeat. Battles are fought, tribute is exacted, treaties are made and broken. Towards the close of the thirteenth century, their king being slain in their churches plundered, they lose one-fourth of their territory, including all that part which borders upon upper Aswan. Those who remain Christians are also condemned to pay an annual capitation tax, in addition to the usual tribute of dates, cotton, slaves, and camels. After this we may conclude that they accepted Islamism from the Arabs, as they had accepted Osiris from the Egyptians and Christ from the Romans. As Christians at all events we hear of them no more. For Christianity and Nubia perished root and branch, and not a cop, it is said, may now be found above the frontier. File was still inhabited in A.D. 1799 when a detachment of Desailles' army under General Beliard took possession of the island and left an inscription on the soffit of the doorway of the Great Pylon to commemorate the passage of the cataract. Denon, describing the scene with his usual vivacity, relates how the natives first defied and then fled from the French, flinging themselves into the river, drowning such of their children as were too young to swim, and escaping into the desert. They appear at this time to have been mere savages, the women ugly and sullen, the men naked, agile, quarrelsome, and armed not only with swords and spears, but with matchlock guns which they used to keep up a brisk and well-directed fire. Their abandonment of the island probably dates from this time, for when Burkhart went up in A.D. 1813 he found it, as we found it to this day, deserted and solitary. One poor old man, if indeed he still lives, is now the one inhabitant of Filet, and I suspect he only crosses over from Biga in the tourist season. He calls himself, with or without authority, the guardian of the island, sleeps in a nest of rags and straw in a sheltered corner behind the Great Temple, and is so wonderfully whizzened and bent and knotted up that nothing of him seems quite alive except his eyes. We gave him fifty copper peras for a parting present when on our way back to Egypt, and he was so oppressed by the consciousness of wealth that he immediately buried his treasure and implored us to tell no one what we had given him. With the French siege and the flight of the native population closes the last chapter of the local history of Filet. The holy island has done henceforth with wars of creeds or kings. It disappears from the domain of history, and enters the domain of science. To have contributed to the discovery of the hieroglyphic alphabet is a high distinction, and in no sketch of Filet, however slight, should the obelisk that furnished Champolion with the name of Cleopatra be allowed to pass unnoticed. This monument, second only to the Rosetta Stone, in point of philological interest, was carried off by Mr. W. Banks, the discoverer of the first tablet of Abidos, and is now in dorset share. Its empty socket and its fellow obelisk, mutilated and solitary, remain in situ at the southern extremity of the island. And now, for we have lingered over long in the portico, it is timely glanced at the interior of the temple. So we go in at the central door, beyond which opens some nine or ten halls and side chambers leading as usual to the sanctuary. Here all is dark, earthy, oppressive. In rooms unlighted by the faintest gleam from without, we find smoke-blackened walls covered with elaborate bobberleafs. Mysterious passages, pitch-dark, thread the thickness of the walls, and communicate by means of trap-like openings with faults below. In the sanctuary lies an overthrown altar, while in the corner behind it stands the very niche in which Strabo must have seen that poor sacred hawk of Ethiopia which he describes as sick and nearly dead. But in this temple dedicated not only to Isis, but to the memory of Osiris and the worship of Horus, their son, there is one chamber which we may be quite sure was shown neither to Strabo nor Deodorus, nor to any stranger of alien faith, be his repute or station what it might, a chamber wholly above all others, clear even than the sanctuary, the chamber sacred to Osiris. We, however, unrestricted, unforbidden, are free to go where we list, and our books tell us that this mysterious chamber is somewhere overhead. So emerging once again into the daylight we go up a well-worn staircase leading out upon the roof. This roof is an intricate, up-and-down place, and the room is not easy to find. It lies at the bottom of a little flight of stairs, a small stone cell some twelve feet square, lighted only from the doorway. The walls are covered with sculptures representing the shrines, the mummification, and the resurrection of Osiris. These shrines containing each some part of his body are variously fashioned. His head, for instance, rests on a nylometer. His arm, surmounted by a head, is sculptured on a stela, in shape resembling a high-shouldered boulder, surmounted by one of the headdresses peculiar to the god, his legs and feet lie full length in a pylon-shaped mausoleum. Upon another shrine stands the meter-shaped crown which he wears as judge of the lower world. Isis and Nephthys keep guard over each shrine. In a lower freeze we see the mummy of the god laid upon a beer, with the four so-called canopic jars ranged underneath. A little farther on he lies in state, surrounded by lotus buds on tall stems, figurative of growth or returning life. Finally he is depicted lying on a couch, his limbs reunited, his head, left hand, and left foot upraised as in the act of returning to consciousness. Nephthys, in the guise of a winged genius, fans him with the breath of life. Isis, with outstretched arms, stands at his feet and seems to be calling him back to her embraces. The scene represents, in fact, that supreme moment when Isis pours forth her passionate invocations, and Osiris is resuscitated by virtue of the songs of the divine sisters. Ill-modeled and ill-cut as they are, there is a clownish naturalness about these little sculptures which lifts them above the conventional dead level of ordinary, telemaic work. The figures tell their tale intelligibly. Osiris seems really struggling to rise, and the action of Isis expresses clearly enough the intention of the artist. Although a few heads have been mutilated and the surface of the stone is somewhat degraded, the subjects are by no means in a bad state of preservation. In the accompanying sketches nothing has been done to improve the defective drawing or repair the broken outlines of the originals. First in one has lost his foot, and in another his face. The hands of Isis are as shapeless as those of a brandal, and the naivete of the treatment verges throughout upon caricature. But the interest attaching to them is altogether apart from the way in which they are executed. And now, returning to the roof, it is pleasant to breathe the fresher air that comes with sunset, to see the island in shape like an ancient Egyptian shield lying mapped out beneath one's feet. From here we look back upon the way we have come and forward to the way we are going. Northward lies the cataract, a network of islets with flashes of river between. Southward the broad current comes on in one smooth glossy sheet, unbroken by a single rapid. How eagerly we turn our eyes that way, for yonder lie Abu Simbel and all the mysterious lands beyond the cataracts. But we cannot see far, for the river curves away grandly to the right, and vanishes behind a range of granite hills. A similar chain hems in the opposite bank, while high above the palm groves fringing the edge of the shore stand two ruined convents on two rocky prominences, like a couple of castles on the Rhine. On the east bank opposite, a few mud houses in a group of superb carob trees mark the side of a village, the greater part of which lies hidden among palms. Behind this village opens a vast sand alley, like an arm of the sea from which the waters have retreated. The old channel along which we rode the other day went plowing that way straight across from Filet. Last of all, forming the western side of this fourfold view, we have the island of Viga, rugged mountainous and divided by Filet by so narrow a channel that every sound from the native village on the opposite steep is as audible as though it came from the courtyard at our feet. That village is built in and about the ruins of a tiny Ptolemaic temple, of which only a screen and doorway and part of a small propylon remain. We can see a woman pounding coffee on the threshold of one of the huts, and some children scrambling about the rocks in pursuit of a wandering turkey. Catching sight of us up here on the roof of the temple, they come whooping and scampering down to the waterside, and with shrill cries importune us for backsheesh. Unless the stream is wider than it looks, one might almost pitch a piastra into their outstretched hands. Mr. Hay, it is said, discovered a secret passage of solid masonry tunneled under the river from island to island. The entrance on this side was from a shaft in the temple of Isis. We are not told how far Mr. Hay was able to penetrate in the direction of Biga, but the passage would lead up, most probably, to the little temple opposite. Perhaps the most entirely curious and unaccustomed features in all this scene are the mountains. They are like none that any of us have seen in our diverse wanderings. Other mountains are homogenous, and thrust themselves up from below in masses, suggestive of primitive disruption and upheaval. These seem to lie upon the surface foundationless, rock loosely piled on rock, bolder on bolder, like stupendous carns, the work of demigods and giants. Here and there, on shelf or summit, a huge rounded mass, many tons in weight, hangs poised capriciously. Most of these blocks I am persuaded would log if put to the test. But for a specimen's stone commend me to yonder amazing monolith down by the water's edge opposite, near the carob trees and the ferry. Though but a single block of orange-red granite it looks like three, and the Arabs seeing it in some fancied resemblance to an arm-chair, call it Pharaoh's Throne. Rounded and polished by primeval floods, and emblazoned with royal cartouches of extraordinary size, it seems to have attracted the attention of pilgrims of all ages. Kings, conquerors, priests, travelers have covered it with records of victories, of religious festivals, of prayers and offerings, and acts of adoration. Some of these are older by a thousand years and more than the temples on the island opposite. Such roundly summed up are the fourfold surroundings of Filet, the cataract, the river, the desert, the invironing mountains. The holy island, beautiful, lifeless, a thing of the far past, with all its wealth of sculpture, painting, history, poetry, tradition, sleeps, or seems to sleep, in the midst. It is one of the world's famous landscapes, and it deserves its fame. Every sketcher sketches it. Every traveler describes it. Yet it is just one of those places of which the objective and subjective features are so equally balanced that it bears putting neither into words nor colors. The sketcher must perforce leave out the atmosphere of association which informs his subject, and the writer's description is at best no better than a catalogue raised on a. CHAPTER XIII. Sailing gently southward, the river opening wide before us, Filet dwindling in the rear, we feel that we are now fairly over the border, and that if Egypt was strange and far from home, Nubia is stranger and farther still. The Nile here flows deep and broad. The rocky heights that hem it in so close on either side are still black on the one hand, golden on the other. The banks are narrower than ever. The space in some places is little wider than a towing path. In others there is barely room for a belt of date palms and a slip of alluvial soil, every foot of which produces its precious growth of dura or barley. The steep verge below is green with lentils to the water's edge. As the river recedes it leaves each day a margin of fresh wet soil in which the careful husbandman hastens to scratch a new furrow and sew another line of seeds. He cannot afford to let so much as an inch of that kindly mud lie idle. Gliding along with half-filled sail we observe how entirely the population seems to be regulated by the extent of arable soil. Where the inundation has room to spread, villages come thicker, more dusky figures are seen moving to and fro in the shade of the palms, more children race along the banks, shrieking for bachsheesh. When the shelf of soil is narrowed, on the contrary, to a mere fringe of luminous green dividing the rot from the river, there is a startling absence of everything like life. Mile after mile drags its slow length along, un-sheered by any sign of human habitation. When now and then a solitary native, armed with gun or spear, is seen striding along the edge of the desert, he only seems to make the general solitude more apparent. Meanwhile, it is not only men and women whom we miss, men laboring by the riverside, women with babies astride on their shoulders or water-jars balanced on their heads, but birds, beasts, boats, everything that we have been used to see along the river. The buffaloes dozing at midday in the shallows, the camels stalking home in single file toward sunset, the waterfowl haunting the sandbanks, seem suddenly to have vanished. Even donkeys are now rare, and as for horses, I do not remember to have seen one during the seven weeks we spent in Nubia. All night, too, instead of the usual chorus of dogs barking furiously from village to village, we hear only the long-drawn wail of an occasional jackal. It is not wonderful, however, that animal life should be scarce in a district where the scant soil yields barely food enough for those who till it. To realize how very scant it is, one only needs to remember that about there, where it is at its widest, the annual deposit nowhere exceeds half a mile in breadth, while for the most part of the way between Filet and Wadi Halfa, a distance of two hundred and ten miles, it averages from six to sixty yards. Here then, more than ever, one seems to see how entirely these lands which we call Egypt and Nubia are nothing but the banks of one solitary river in the midst of a world of desert. In Egypt the valley is often so wide that one forgets the stony waste beyond the cornlands. But in Nubia the desert is ever present. We cannot forget it if we would. The barren mountains press upon our path, showering down avalanches of granite on the one side and torrents of yellow sand on the other. We know that those stones are always falling, that those sands are always drifting, that the river has hard work to hold its own, and that the desert is silently encroaching day by day. These golden sand streams are the newest and most beautiful feature in the landscape. They pour down from the high level of the Libyan desert, just as the snows of Switzerland pour down from the upper plateaus of the Alps. Through every ravine and gap they find a channel, here trickling in tiny rivulets, flowing yonder in broad torrents that widen to the river. We calmed a few miles above Filet, we found ourselves at the foot of one of these large drifts. The M.B.s challenged us to climb the slope and see the sunset from the desert. It was about six o'clock, and the thermometer was standing at eighty degrees in the coolest corner of the large saloon. We ventured to suggest that the top was a long way up, but the M.B.s would take no refusal. So away we went, panting, breathless, bewailing our hard fate. El and the rider had done some difficult walking in their time, over ice and snow, on lava cold and hot, up cinder slopes, and beds of mountain torrents. But this innocent-looking sanddrift proved quite as hard to climb as any of them. The sand lies wonderfully loose and light, and is as hot as if it had been baked in an oven. Into this the foot plunges ankle deep, slipping back at every step and leaving a huge hole into which the sand pours down again like water. Looking back you trace your course by a succession of funnel- shaped pits, each larger than a wash-hand basin. Though your slipper be as small as Cinderella's, the next comer shall not be able to tell whether it was a lady who went up last or a camel. It is toilsome work, too, for the foot finds neither rest nor resistance, and the strain upon the muscles is unremitting. But the beauty of the sand more than repays the fatigue of climbing it. Smooth, sheeny satiny, fine as diamond dust, supple, undulating luminous, it lies in the most exquisite curves and wreaths like a snowdrift turned gold. Remodeled by every breath that blows, its ever-varying surface presents an endless play of delicate lights and shadows. There lives not the sculptor who could render those curves, and I doubt whether Turner himself, in his tenderest and subtlest mood, could have done justice to those complex grays and ambers. Having paused to rest upon an outcropping ledge of rock about half way up, we came at length to the top of the last slope and found ourselves on the level of the desert. Here, faithful to the course of the river, the first objects to meet our eyes were the old familiar telegraph posts and wires. Beyond them, to north and south, a crowd of peaks closed in the view, but westward a rolling waist of hillock and hollow opened away to where the sun, a crimson globe, had already half vanished below the rim of the world. One could not resist going a few steps farther just to touch the nearest of those telegraph posts. It was like reaching out a hand towards home. End of Section 37 A thousand miles up the Nile, Section 38. 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 XIII. Fillet to Carrasco, Part II When the sun dropped, we turned back. The valley below was already steeped in dusk. The Nile, glimmering like a coiled snake in the shade, reflected the evening sky in three separate reaches. On the Arabian side, a far-off mountain chain stood out, full and jagged against the eastern horizon. To come down again was easy. Driving our heels well into the sand, we half ran, half glissated, and soon reached the bottom. Here we were met by an old Nubian woman who had treached up in all haste from the nearest village to question our sailors about one Yusuf, her son, of whom she had heard nothing for nearly a year. She was a very poor old woman, a widow, and this Yusuf was her only son. According to Beter himself he had worked his passage to Cairo in a cargo boat some eighteen months ago. Twice since then he had sent her messages and money, but now eleven months had gone by in silence, and she feared he must be dead. Meanwhile her date-palm, taxed to the full value of its produce, had this year yielded not a piazzera of profit. Her mud-hud had fallen in, and there was no Yusuf to repair it. Old and sick she could now only beg, and her neighbors, by whose charity she subsisted, were but a shade less poor than herself. Our men knew nothing of the missing Yusuf. Rais Hassan promised, when he went back, to make inquiries among the boatmen of Bulak. But then he added, there are so many Yusufs in Cairo. It made one's heart ache to see the tremulous eagerness with which the poor soul put her questions, and the crushed look in her face when she turned away. And now being fortunate in respect of the wind, which for the most part blows steadily from the north between sunrise and sunset, we make good progress, and for the next ten days live pretty much on board our Dahabia. The main features of the landscape go on repeating themselves with but little variation from day to day. The mountains wear their habitual livery of black and gold. The river, now widening, now narrowing, flows between banks blossoming with lentils and lupins. With these, and yellow acacia tufts, and blue castor oil berries, and the weird coloquintita with its downy leaf and milky juice and puff-bladder fruit, like a green peach tinged with purple, we make our daily bouquet for the dinner table. All other flowers have vanished, and even these are hard to get in a land where every green blade is precious to the grower. Now too the climate becomes sensibly warmer. The heat of the sun is so great at midday that, even with a north breeze blowing, we can no longer sit on deck between twelve and three. Toward sundown when the wind drops, it turns so sultry that to take a walk on shore comes to be regarded as a duty rather than a pleasure. Thanks, however, to that indomitable painter who is always ready for an afternoon excursion, we do sometimes walk for an hour before dinner, striking off generally into the desert, looking for onyxes and carnelians among the pebbles that here and there strew the surface of the sand, and watching in vain for jackals and desert hares. Sometimes we follow the banks instead of the desert, coming now and then to a creaking saquilla turned by a melancholy buffalo, or to a native village hidden behind dwarf palms. Here each hut has its tiny forecourt, in the midst of which stand the mud oven and mud cupboard of the family, two dumpy cones of smooth gray clay like big chimney-pots, the one capped with a lid, the other fitted with a little wooden door and a wooden bolt. Some of the houses have barbaric ornament palmed off, so to say upon the walls, the pattern being simply the impression of a human hand dipped in red or yellow ochre, and applied while the surface is moist. The amount of bazaar that takes place whenever we enter one of these villages is quite alarming. The dogs give first notice of our approach, and presently we are surrounded by all the women and girls of the place, offering live pigeons, eggs, vegetable marrows, necklaces, nose rings, and silver bracelets for sale. The boys pester us to buy wretched, half-dead chameleons. The men stand aloof and leave the bargaining to the women. And the women not only know how to bargain, but how to assess the relative value of every coin that passes current on the Nile. Rupees, rubles, rails, dollars, and shillings are as intelligible to them as paras or piastras. Sovereigns are not too heavy nor Napoleon's too light for them. The times are changed since Belzoni's Nubian, after staring contemptuously at the first piece of money he had ever seen, asked who would give anything for that small piece of metal. The necklaces consisted of onyx, carnelian, bone, silver, and colored glass beads, with now and then a stray scarab or amulet in the ancient blue porcelain. The arrangement of color is often very subtle. The brow pendants in gold repousse and the massive old silver bracelets rough with knobs and bosses are most interesting in design and perpetuate patterns of undoubted antiquity. The M.B.'s picked up one really beautiful color of silver and coral, which might have been worn three thousand years ago by Pharaoh's daughter. While on board we began now to keep a sharp lookout for crocodiles. We hear of them constantly, see their tracks upon the sandbanks in the river, go through agonies of exploration over every black speck in the distance, yet are perpetually disappointed. The farther south we go the more impatient we become. The ease, whose dahabia, homeward bound, drift slowly past one calm morning, report eleven beauties seen all together yesterday upon a sand island some ten miles higher up. Under Seabee's boat garlanded with crocodiles from stem to stern fills us with envy. We would give our ears, almost, to see one of these engaging reptiles dangling from either our own main mast or that of the faithful bagstones. Alfred, who has his heart set on bagging at least half a dozen, says nothing but grows gloomy or day by day. At night when the moon is up and less misanthropic folk are in bed and asleep, he rambles moodily into the desert after jackals. CHAPTER XIII. Meanwhile on we go, starting at sunrise, mooring at sunset, sailing, tracking, punting, never stopping for an hour by day, if we can help it, and pushing straight for Abu Simbel with as little delay as possible. Thus we pass the pylons of Dibaud with their background of desert, ghertas, a miniature sunium seen towards evening against the glowing sunset, taffa rich in palms with white columns gleaming through green foliage by the waterside, the cliffs, islands, and rapids of Calabasha, and the huge temple which rises like a fortress in their midst, dendur a tiny chapel with a single pylon, and gherthasen, which from this distance might be taken for the mouth of a rock-cut tomb in the face of the precipice. About half way between Calabasha and dendur we enter the tropic of cancer, from this day till the day when we repass that invisible boundary, there is a marked change in the atmospheric conditions under which we live. The days get gradually hotter, especially at noon when the sun is almost vertical, but the freshness of night and the chill of early morning are no more. Unless a strong wind blows from the north we no longer know what it is to need a shawl on deck in the evening, or an extra covering on our beds towards dawn. We sleep with our cabin windows open and enjoy a delicious equality of temperature from sundown to sunrise. The days and nights too are of almost equal length. Now also the southern cross and a second group of stars, which we conclude must form part of the centaur, are visible between two and four every morning. They have been creeping up a star at a time for the last fortnight, but are still so low upon the eastern horizon that we can only see them when there comes a break in the mountain chain on that side of the river. At the same time our old familiar friends of the northern hemisphere looking strangely distorted and out of their proper place are fast disappearing on the opposite side of the heavens. Orion seems to be lying on his back and the great bear to be standing on his tail, while Cassiopeia and a number of others have deserted en masse. The zenith, meanwhile, is but thinly furnished so that we seem to have traveled away from the one hemisphere and not yet to have reached the other. As for the southern cross, we reserve our opinion till we get farther south. It would be treason to hint that we are disappointed in so famous a constellation. After Gurf Hossain, the next place of importance for which our maps bid us look out is Staka. As we draw near, expecting hourly to see something of the temple, the Nile increases in breadth and beauty. It is a peaceful, glassy morning. The men have been tracking since dawn and stopped to breakfast at the foot of a sandy bank, wooded with tamarisks and gum trees. A glistening network of gossamer floats from bow to bow. The sky overhead is of a tender luminous blue such as we never see in Europe. The air is wonderfully still. The river, which here takes a sudden bend towards the east, looks like a lake and seems to be barred ahead by the desert. Presently a funeral passes along the opposite bank. The chief mourner flourishing a long staff like a drum major, the women snatching up handfuls of dust and scattering it upon their heads. We hear their wild wail long after the procession is out of sight. Going on again presently, our whole attention becomes absorbed by the new and singular geological features of the Libyan desert. A vast plain covered with isolated mountains of volcanic structure, it looks like some strange chanformation of the Puy-de-Dome plateau, with all its wimps-swept pastures turned to sand and its grassy craters stripped to barrenness. The more this plain widens out before our eyes, the more it bristles with peaks. As we round the corner and DACA like a smaller edfoo comes into sight upon the western bank, the whole desert on that side, as far as the eye can see, presents the unmistakable aspect of one vast field of volcanoes. As in Overn, these cones are of all sizes and heights, some low and rounded like mere bubbles that have cooled without bursting, others ranging apparently from 1,000 to 1,500 feet in height. The broken craters of several are plainly distinguishable by the help of a field-glass. One in particular is so like our old friend the Puy-de-Pareau that in a mere black and white sketch the one might readily be mistaken for the other. We were surprised to find no account of the geology of this district in any of our books. Marie and Wilkinson pass it in silence, and riders of travels, one or two of whom notice only the pyramidal shape of the hills, are for the most part content to do likewise. None seem to have observed their obvious volcanic origin. Thanks to a light breeze springing up in the afternoon, we were able to hoist our big sail again and to relieve the men from tracking. Thus we glided past the ruins of Maharaqa, which seen from the river looked like a Greek portico set in a hollow waste of burning desert. Next came Wadi Sabua, a temple half buried in sand, near which we met a tiny Dahabia manned by two Nubians and flying the star and crescent. A shabby government inspector in European dress and nefes lay smoking on a mat outside his cabin door, while from a spar overhead there hung a mighty crocodile. This monster was of a greenish-brown color and measured at least sixteen feet from head to tail. His jaws yawned, and one flat and flabby arm in ponderous paws swung with the motion of the boat, looking horribly human. The painter, with an eye to four grounds, made a bid for him on the spot, but the shabby inspector was not to be moved by considerations of gain. He preferred his crocodile to infidel gold, and scarcely deigned even to reply to the offer. Seen in the half-light of a tropical afterglow, the purple mountains coming down in detached masses to the water's edge on the one side, the desert with its volcanic peaks yet rosy upon the other, we thought the approach to Carasco more picturesque than anything we had yet seen south of the cataract. As the dust deepened, the moon rose, and the palms that had just room to grow between the mountains and the river turned from bronze to silver. It was half-twilight, half-moonlight by the time we reached the mooring place, where Ptolemy, who had been sent forward in the small boat half an hour ago, jumped on board laden with a packet of letters and a sheaf of newspapers. For here, where the great caravan route leads off across the desert to Cartoum, we touched the first Nubian post office. It was only ten days since we had received our last budget at Aswan, but it seemed like ten weeks. CHAPTER XIV. CARASCO TO ABU SYMBOL PART I. It so happened that we arrived at Carasco on the eve of El Ed Elkeber, or the anniversary of the sacrifice of Abraham, when according to the Muslim version Ishmael was the intended victim and a ram the substituted offering. Now, El Ed Elkeber, being one of the great feasts of the Muhamedian calendar, is a day of gifts and good wishes. The rich visit their friends and distribute meat to the poor, and every true believer goes to the mosque to say his prayers in the morning. So instead of starting as usual at sunrise, we treated our sailors to a sheep, and waited till past noon that they might make holiday. They began the day by trooping off to the village mosque in all the glory of new blue blouses, spotless turbans, and scarlet leather slippers, then loitered about till dinnertime when the said sheep, stewed with lentils and garlic, brought the festivities to an end. It was a thin and ancient beast, and must have been horribly tough, but an epicure might have envied the childlike enjoyment with which our honest fellow squatted, cross-legged and happy, round the smoking cauldron, chattering, laughing, feasting, dipping their fingers in the common mess, washing the whole down with long drafts of nile water, and finishing off with a Hubble bubble passed from lip to lip, and a mouth full of muddy coffee. By a little after midday they had put off their finery, harnessed themselves to the tow-rope, and set to work to haul us through the rocky shoals which here impede the current. From Carrasco to Dere the actual distance is about eleven miles and a half, but what with obstructions in the bed of the river, and what with a wind that would have been favourable but for another great bend which the nile takes towards the east. Those eleven miles and a half cost us the best part of two days' hard tracking. Landing from time to time when the boat was close in shore, we found the order of planting everywhere the same. Lupins and lentils on the slope against the waterline, an uninterrupted grove of palms on the edge of the bank, in the space beyond fields of cotton and young corn, and then the desert. The arable soil was divided off, as usual, by hundreds of water channels, and seemed to be excellently farmed as well as abundantly irrigated. Not a weed was to be seen, not an inch of soil appeared to be wasted. In odd corners where there was room for nothing else, cucumbers and vegetable marrows flourished and bore fruit. Nowhere had we seen castor berries so large, cotton pods so full, or palms so lofty. Here also for the first time in Egypt we observed among the bushes a few hoopos and other small birds, and on a sand slope down by the river a group of wild ducks. We, that is to say, one of the M.B.s and the rider, had wandered off that way in search of crocodiles. The two Dahavias, each with its file of trackers, were slowly laboring up against the current about a mile away. All was intensely hot and intensely silent. We had walked far and had seen no crocodile. What we should have done if we had met with one I am not prepared to say. Perhaps we should have run away. At all events we were just about to turn back when we caught sight of the ducks sunning themselves half asleep on the brink of a tiny pool about an eighth of a mile away. Creeping cautiously under the bank we contrived to get within a few yards of them. There were four, a drake, a duck, and two young ones, exquisitely feathered and as small as teal. The parent birds could scarcely have measured more than eight inches from head to tail. All alike had chestnut colored heads with a narrow buff stripe down the middle like a parting, maroon backs, wing feathers maroon and gray, and tails tipped with buff. They were so pretty and the little family party was so complete that the writer could not help secretly rejoicing that Alfred and his gun were safe on board the bagstones. High above the Libyan bank on the sloping verge of the desert stands half-drowned in sand the little temple of Amada. Seeing it from the opposite side while duck hunting in the morning, I had taken it for one of the many stone shelters erected by Mohammed Ali for the accommodation of cattle levied annually in the Sudan. It proved, however, to be a temple, small but massive, built with squared blocks of sandstone and dating back to the very old times of the usertessens and tutmoses. It consists of a portico, a transverse atrium, and three small chambers. The pillars of the portico are mere square piers. The rooms are small and low. The roof constructed of oblong blocks is flat from end to end. As an architectural structure it is, in fact, but a few degrees removed from Stonehenge. A shed without, this little temple is, however, a cameo within. Nowhere save in the tomb of tea had we seen Ba reliefs so delicately modeled, so rich in color. Here, as elsewhere, the walls are covered with groups of kings and gods and hieroglyphic texts. The figures are slender and animated. The headdresses, jewelry, and patterned robes are elaborately drawn and painted. Every head looks like a portrait. Every hieroglyphic form is a study in miniature. Apart from its exquisite finish the wall sculpture of Amada has, however, nothing in common with the wall sculpture of the ancient empire. It belongs to the period of Egyptian Renaissance. And, though inferior in power and naturalness to the work of the elder school, it marks just that moment of special development when the art of modeling in low relief had touched the highest level to which it ever again attained. The highest level belongs to the reigns of Tutmost II and Tutmost III, just as the perfect era in architecture belongs to the reigns of Sedi I and Ramesses II. It is for this reason that Amada is so precious. It registers an epic in the history of the art, and gives us the best of that epic in the hour of its zenith. The sculptor is here seen to be working within bounds already prescribed, yet within those bounds he still enjoys a certain liberty. His art, though largely conventionalized, is not yet stereotyped. His sense of beauty still finds expression. There is, in short, a grace and sweetness about the bar relief designs of Amada for which one looks in vain to the storied walls of Karnak. The chambers are half choked with sand, and we had to crawl into the sanctuary upon our hands and knees. A long inscription at the upper end records how Amonhotep II, returning from his first campaign against the Rutan, slew seven kings with his own hand, six of whom were gibbeted upon the ramparts of thieves, while the body of the seventh was sent to Ethiopia by water and suspended on the outer wall of the city of Napata, in order that the Negroes might behold the victories of the Pharaoh in all the lands of the world. In the darkest corner of the atrium we observed a curious tableau representing the king embraced by a goddess. He holds a short, straight sword in his right hand and the crooks ansada in his left. On his head he wears the keperj, or war-helmet, a kind of blue meter studded with gold stars and ornamented with the royal asp. The goddess clasps him lovingly about the neck and bends her lips to his. The artist has given her the yellow complexion conventionally ascribed to women, but her saucy mouth and Nezret Rousseau are distinctly European. Dressed in the fashion of the nineteenth century she might have served leech as a model for his girl of the period. The sand has drifted so high at the back of the temple that one steps upon the roof, as upon a terrace, only just raised above the level of the desert. Soon that level will be equal, and if nothing is done to rescue it within the next generation or two, the whole building will become engulfed and its very sight forgotten. The view from the roof looking back towards Carrasco and forward towards Der is one of the finest, perhaps quite the finest in Nubia. The Nile curves grandly through the foreground. The palm woods of Der are green in the distance. The mountain region which we have just traversed ranges, a vast crescent of multitudinous peaks, round two-thirds of the horizon. Ridge beyond ridge, and beyond chain, flushing crimson in light and deepening through every tint of amethyst and purple and shadow, these innumerable summits fade into tenderest blue upon the horizon. As the sun sets they seem to glow, to become incandescent, to be touched with flame, as in the old time when every crater was a font of fire. Struggling next morning through a maze of sandbanks, we reached Der soon after breakfast. This town, the Nubian capital, lies a little lower than the level of the bank, so that only a few mud walls are visible from the river. Having learned by this time that a capital is but a bigger village containing perhaps a mosque and a market space, we were not disappointed by the unimposing aspect of the Nubian metropolis. Great however was our surprise when, instead of the usual clamorous crowd screaming, pushing, scrambling and bothering for backsheesh, we found the landing-place deserted. Two or three native boats lay up under the bank empty. There was literally not a soul in sight. L and the little lady, eager to buy some of the basket-work for which the place is famous, looked blank. Ptolemy, anxious to lay in a store of fresh eggs and vegetables, looked blanker. We landed. Before us lay an open space at the farther end of which, facing the river, stood the Governor's palace, the said palace being a magnified mud hut, with the frieze of baked bricks round the top and an imposing stone doorway. In this doorway, according to immemorial usage, the great man gives audience. We saw him, a mere youth apparently, puffing away at a long shabouk, in the midst of a little group of gray-beard elders. They looked at us gravely immovably, like smoking automata. One longed to go up and ask them if they were all transformed to black granite from the waist to the feet, and if the inhabitants of dare had been changed into bluestones. Still bent on buying baskets, if baskets were to be bought, bent also on finding out the whereabouts of a certain rock-cut temple which our books told us to look for at the back of the town, we turned aside into a straggling street leading towards the desert. The houses looked better built than usual, some panes having evidently been bestowed in smoothing the surface of the mud, and ornamenting the doorways with fragments of colored pottery. A cracked willow-pattern dinner-plate, set like a fan-light over one, and a white soup-plate over another, came doubtless from the canteen of some English dahabiya and were the pride of their possessors. Looking from end to end of this street, and it was a tolerably long one with the nile at one end and the desert at the other, we saw no sign or shadow of moving creature. Only one young woman, hearing strange voices talking in a strange tongue, peeped out suddenly from a half-open door as we went by, then seeing me look at the baby in her arms, which was hideous and had sore eyes, drew her veil across its face and darted back again. She thought I coveted her treasure, and she dreaded the evil eye. All at once we heard a sound like the far-off quivering of many owls. It shrilled, swelled, wavered, dropped, then died away, like the moaning of the wind at sea. We held our breath and listened. We had never heard anything so wild and plaintive. Then suddenly, through an opening between the houses, we saw a great crowd on a space of rising ground about a quarter of a mile away. This crowd consisted of men only, a close, turbaned mass, some three or four hundred in number, all standing quite still and silent, all looking in the same direction. Hurrying on to the desert, we saw the strange sight at which they were looking. Chapter 14 Carrasco to Abu-Simbal, Part II The scene was a barren sand slope hemmed in between the town and cliffs and dotted over with graves. The actors were all women. Huddled together under a long wall some few hundred yards away, bare-headed and exposed to the blaze of the morning sun, they outnumbered the men by a full third. Some were sitting, some standing, while in their midst pressing round a young woman who seemed to act as leader, their suede encircled and shuffled a compact phalanx of dancers. On this young woman the eyes of all were turned. A black Cassandra she rocked her body from side to side, clapped her hands above her head and poured forth a wild, declamatory chant which the rest echoed. This chant seemed to be divided into stroves, at the end of each of which she paused, beat her breast, and broke into that terrible wail that we had heard just now from a distance. Her brother, it seemed, had died last night and we were witnessing his funeral. The actual interment was over by the time we reached the spot, but four men were still busy filling the grave with sand, which they scraped up a bowlful at a time and stamped down with their naked feet. The deceased being unmarried his sister led the choir of mourners. She was a tall, gaunt young woman of the plainest Nubian type, with high cheekbones, eyes slanting upwards at the corners and an enormous mouth full of glittering teeth. On her head she wore a white cloth smeared with dust. Her companions were distinguished by a narrow white fillet bound about the brow and tied with two long ends behind. They had hidden their necklaces and bracelets and wore trailing robes and shawls and loose trousers of black or blue calico. We stood for a long time watching their uncouth dance. None of the women seemed to notice us but the men made way civilly and gravely, letting us pass to the front that we might get a better view of the ceremony. By and by an old woman rose slowly from the midst of those who were sitting and moved with tottering uncertain steps towards a higher point of ground, a little apart from the crowd. There was a movement of compassion among the men, one of whom turned to the rider and said gently, his mother. She was a small feeble old woman, very poorly clad. Her hands and arms were like the hands and arms of a mummy, and her withered black face looked ghastly under the mask of dust. For a few moments, swaying her body slowly to and fro, she watched the gravedigger stamping down the sand, then stretched out her arms and broke into a torrent of lamentations. The dialect of dare is strange and barbarous, but we felt as if we understood every word she uttered. Presently the tears began to make channels down her cheeks, her voice became choked with sobs, and falling down in a sort of helpless heap like a broken hearted dog, she lay with her face to the ground and there stayed. Meanwhile the sand being now filled in and mounted up the men betook themselves to a place where the rock had given way, and selected a couple of big stones from the debris. These they placed at the head and foot of the grave, and all was done. Instantly, perhaps at an appointed signal, though we saw none given, the wailing ceased, the women rose, every tongue was loosened, and the whole became a moving, animated, noisy throng dispersing in a dozen different directions. We turned away with the rest, the rider and the painter rambling off in search of the temple, while the other three devoted themselves to the pursuit of baskets and native jewelry. When we looked back presently the crowd was gone, but the desolate mother still lay motionless in the dust. It chanced that we witnessed many funerals in Nubia, so many that one sometimes felt inclined to doubt whether the governor of Aswan had not reported over favorably of the health of the province. The ceremonial with its dancing and chanting was always much the same, always barbaric and in the highest degree artificial. One would like to know how much of it is derived from purely African sources and how much from ancient Egyptian tradition. The dance is most probably Ethiopian. Lepceus, traveling through the Sudan in 80, 1843, saw something of the kind at a funeral in Wed Medina, about half way between Senar and Khartoum. The white fillet worn by the choir of mourners is, on the other hand, distinctly Egyptian. We afterwards saw it represented in paintings of funeral processions on the wall of several tombs at Thebes, where the wailing women are seen to be gathering up dust in their hands and casting it upon their heads just as they do now. As for the wail, beginning high and descending through a scale divided not by semitones but thirds of tones, to a final note about an octave and a half lower than that from which it started, probably echoes to this day the very pitch and rhythm of the wail that followed the pharaohs to their sepulchres in the valley of the tombs of the kings. Like the Zagarete or joy cry which every mother teaches to her little girls, and which, it is said, can only be acquired in very early youth, it has been handed down from generation to generation through an untold succession of ages. The song to which the phela works his Shadouf and the monotonous chant of the Sakia driver have perhaps as remote an origin. But of all old, mournful human sounds, the death wail that we heard it dare is perhaps one of the very oldest, certainly the most mournful. The temple here, dating from the reign of Ramses II, is a rude design and indifferent execution. Partly constructed, partly excavated, it is approached by a forecourt, the roof of which was supported by eight square columns. Of these columns only the bases remain. Four massive piers against which once stood four Colossae upheld the roof of the portico and gave admission by three entrances to the rock-cut chambers beyond. That portico is now ruthless. Nothing is left of the Colossae but their feet. All is ruined and ruined without beauty. Seen from within, however, the place is not without a kind of gloomy grandeur. Two rows of square columns, three at each side, divide the large hall into a nave and two aisles. This hall is about forty feet square and the pillars have been less standing in the living rock, like those in the early tombs at Siouxt. The daylight, half blocked out by the fallen portico, is pleasantly subdued and finds its way dimly to the sanctuary at the farther end. The sculptures of the interior, though much damaged, are less defaced than those of the outer court. Walls, pillars, doorways are covered with bar-reliefs. The king and ta, the king and ra, the king and amen, stand face to face, hand and hand, on each of the four sides of every column. Scenes of worship, of slaughter, of anointing cover the walls, and the blank spaces are filled in as usual with hieroglyphic inscriptions. Among these, Champollion discovered an imperfect list of the sons and daughters of Ramesses II. Four gods once sat enthroned at the upper end of the sanctuary, but they have shared the fate of the Colossae outside, and only their feet remain. The wall sculptures of this dark little chamber are, however, better preserved and better worth preservation than those of the hall. A procession of priests bearing on their shoulders the barry or sacred boat is quite unharmed, and even the color is yet fresh upon a full-length figure of Hathor close by. But more interesting than all these, more interesting because more rare is a sculptured palm tree against which the king leans while making an offering to amen ra. The trunk is given with elaborate truthfulness, and the branches, though formalized, are correct and graceful in curvature. The tree is but an accessory. It may have been introduced with reference to the date harvest which are the wealth of the district, but it has no kind of sacred significance and is noticeable only for the naturalness of the treatment. Such naturalness is unusual in the art of this period, when the conventional Persia and the equally conventional Lotus are almost the only vegetable forms which appear on the walls of the temples. I can recall indeed but one similar instance in the bas-relief sculptures of the new empire. Namely the bent, broken, and waving bullrushes in the great lion hunting scene at Medenet Habu, which are admirably free and studied apparently from nature. Coming out, we looked in vain along the courtyard walls for the battle scene in which Shampolyun was yet able to trace the famous fighting lion of Ramesses II, with the legend describing him as the servant of his majesty rending his foes in pieces. But that was forty-five years ago. Now it is with difficulty that one detects a few vague outlines of chariot wheels and horses. There are some rock-cut tombs in the face of the cliffs close by. The painter explored them while the writer sketched the interior of the temple, but he reported of them as mere sepulchres, unpainted and unsculptured. The rocks, the sands, the sky were at white heat when we again turned our faces toward the river. Where there had so lately been a great multitude there was now not a soul. The palms nodded, the pigeons dozed, the mud town slept in the sun. Even the mother had gone from her place of weeping and left her dead to the silence of the desert. We went and looked at his grave. The fresh-turned sand was only a little darker than the rest, and but for the trampled foot-marks round about we could scarcely have been able to distinguish the new mound from the old ones. All were alike nameless. Some more cared for than the rest were bordered with large stones and filled in with variegated pebbles. One or two were fenced about with a mud-wall. All had a bowl of baked clay at the head. Here we saw burial-ground in Nubia we saw these bowls upon the graves. The mourners they told us mourn here for forty days, during which time they come every Friday and fill the bowl with fresh water that the birds may drink from it. The bowls on the other graves were dry and full of sand, but the new bowl was brimming full and the water in it was hot to the touch. We found Elle and the happy couple standing at bay with their backs against a big lebbage-tree surrounded by an immense crowd and far from comfortable. Bent on bizarring they had probably shown themselves too ready to buy, so bringing the whole population, with all the mats, baskets, nose-rings, finger-rings, necklaces, and bracelets in the place about their ears. Seeing the straits they were in we ran to the Dahabia and dispatched three or four sailors to the rescue, who brought them off in triumph. Even in Egypt it does not answer as a rule to go about on shore without an escort. The people are apt to be important and can difficulty be kept at a pleasant distance. But in Nubia where the traveller's life was scarcely safe fifty years ago, unprotected Englishies are pretty certain to be disagreeably mobbed. The natives, in truth, are still mere savages of fond, the old war paint being but half disguised under a thin veneer of Mohammedism. Some of the women who followed our friends to the boat, though in complexion as black as the rest, had light blue eyes and frizzy red hair, the effect of which was indescribably frightful. Both here and at Ebram there are many of these fair families who claim to be descended from Bosnian fathers stationed in Nubia at the time of the conquest of Sultan Saleem in A.D. 1517. They are immensely proud of their alien blood and think themselves quite beautiful. CHAPTER XIV. KORASCO TO ABU SEMBLE PART III All hands being safe on board we pushed off at once, leaving about a couple of hundred disconsolate dealers on the bank. A long-drawn howl of disappointment followed in our wake. Those who had sold and those who had not sold were alike wronged, ruined, and betrayed. One woman tore wildly along the bank, shrieking and beating her chest. Foremost among the sellers she had parted from her gold brow pendant for a good price, but was inconsolable now for the loss of it. It often happened that those who had been most eager to trade were readiness to repent of their bargains. Even so, however, their cupidity outweighed their love of finery. Moved once or twice by the lamentations of some dark damsel who had sold her necklace at a handsome profit, we offered to annul the purchase. But it invariably proved that, despite her tears, she preferred to keep the money. The palms of dare and of the rich desert beyond were the finest we saw throughout the journey. They in strong and magnificently plumed they rose to an average height of seventy or eighty feet. These superb plantations supply all Egypt with saplings and contribute a heavy tax to the revenue. The fruit sun-dried and shriveled is also sent northwards in large quantities. The trees are cultivated with strenuous industry by the natives and know as much of their perfection to laborious irrigation as to climate. The foot of each separate palm is surrounded by a circular trench into which the water is conducted by a small channel about fourteen inches in width. Every palm grove stands in a network of these artificial runlets. The reservoir from which they are supplied is filled by means of a saquilla or waterwheel. A primitive and picturesque machine consisting of two wheels, the one set vertically to the river and slung with a chain of pots, the other a horizontal cog turned sometimes by a camel, but more frequently a nubia by a buffalo. The pots which go down empty dip under the water and come up full feed a sloping trough which in some places supplies a reservoir and in others communicates at once with the irrigating channels. These saquillas are kept perpetually going and are set so close just above dare that the rider counted a line of fifteen within the space of a single mile. There were probably quite as many on the opposite bank. The saquillas creak atrociously and their creaking ranges over an unlimited gamut. From morning till dewy eve, from dewy eve till morn they squeak, they squeal, they grind, they groan, they creak. Heard after dark saquilla answering to saquilla their melancholy chorus makes night hideous. To sleep through it is impossible. Being obliged to moor a few miles beyond dare and having lain awake half the night we offered a saquilla driver a couple of dollars if he would let his wheel rest till morning. But time and water are more precious than even dollars at this season and the man refused. All we could do, therefore, was to punt into the middle of the river and lie off at a point as nearly possible equidistant from our two nearest enemies. The native dearly loves the tree which costs him so much labor and thinks it the chef-d'oeuvre of creation. When Allah made the first man, says an Arab legend, he found he had a little clay to spare, so with that he made the palm. And to the poor Nubian at all events the gifts of the palm are almost divine. Supplying food for his children, thatch for his hovel, timber for his water-wheel, ropes, matting, cups, bowls, and even the strong drink forbidden by the Prophet. The date-wine is yellowish-white, like whiskey. It is not a wine, however, but a spirit, coarse, fiery, and unpalatable. Certain trees, as for instance the perky little pine of the German walled, are apt to become monotonous, but one never wearies of the palm. Whether taken singly or in masses it is always graceful, always suggestive. To the sketcher on the Nile it is simply invaluable. It breaks the long parallels of river and bank, and composes with the stern lines of Egyptian architecture as no other tree in the world could do. Subjects indeed, said once upon a time an eminent artist to the present writer. Fiddlesticks about subjects. Your true painter can make a picture out of a post and a puddle. Substitute a palm, however, for a post. Combine it with anything that comes first, a camel, a Shadoof, a woman with a water jar upon her head, and your picture stands before you, ready-made. Nothing more surprised me at first than the color of the palm-fraund, which painters of eastern landscapes are want to depict of a hard bluish tent, like the color of a yucca-leaf. Its true shade is a tender, bloomy, sea-green gray, difficult enough to match, but in most exquisite harmony with the glow of the sky and the gold of the desert. The palm groves kept us company for many a mile, backed on the Arabian side by long-level ranges of sandstone cliffs horizontally stratified, like those of the Thabad. We now scarcely ever saw a village, only palms and sequias and sandbanks in the river. The villages were there but invisible, being built on the verge of the desert. Arrable land is too valuable in Nubia for either the living to dwell upon it or the dead to be buried in it. At Ebram, a sort of ruined Aaron Brightstein on the top of a grand precipice overhanging the river, we touched for only a few minutes in order to buy a very small shaggy sheet which had been brought down to the landing-place for sale. But for the breeze that happened just then to be blowing we should have liked to climb the rock and see the view in the ruins, which are part modern, part Turkish, part Roman, and little, if at all, Egyptian. There are also some sculptured and painted grottoes to be seen in the southern face of the mountain. They are, however, too difficult of access to be attempted by ladies. Alfred, who went ashore after quail, was drawn up to them by ropes, but found them so much defaced as to be scarcely worth the trouble of a visit. We were now only thirty-four miles from Abu Simbel, but making slow progress and impatiently counting every foot of the way. The heat at times was great, frequent and fitful spells of come-soon wind alternating with a hot calm that tried the trackers sorely. Still we pushed forward a few miles at a time till by and by the flat-topped cliffs dropped out of sight and were again succeeded by volcanic peaks, some of which looked loftier than any of those about Dhaka or Khorosko. Then the palms ceased and the belt of cultivated land narrowed to a thread of green between the rocks and the water's edge, and at last there came an evening when we only wanted breeze enough to double two or three more bends in the river. Is it to be Abu Simbel tonight? we asked for the twentieth time before going down to dinner. To which Rais Hassan replied, Iowa, certainly, but the pilot shook his head and added, Bukra, to-morrow. When we came up again the moon had risen but the breeze had dropped. Still we moved, impelled by a breath so faint that one could scarcely feel it. Presently even this failed. The sail collapsed, the pilot steered for the bank, the captain gave the word to go aloft, when a sudden puff from the north changed our fortunes, and sent us out again with a well-field sail into the middle of the river. None of us, I think, will be likely to forget the sustained excitement of the next three hours. A light more mysterious and unreal than the light of day filled and overflowed the wide expanse of river and desert. We could see the mountains of Abu Simbel standing as it seemed across our path in the far distance, a lower one first than a larger than a series of receding heights all close together yet all distinctly separate. That large one, the mountain of the great temple, held us like a spell. For a long time it looked a mere mountain like the rest. By and by, however, we fancied we detected a something, a shadow, such a shadow as might be cast by a gigantic buttress. Just appeared a black speck no bigger than a porthole. We knew that this black speck must be the doorway. We knew that the great statues were there, though not yet visible, and that we must soon see them. For our sailors, meanwhile, there was an excitement of a chase. The bad stones and three other dahabias were coming up behind us in the path of the moonlight. Their galley fires glowed like beacons on the water, the nearest about a mile away, the last a spark in the distance. We were not in the mood to care much for racing tonight, but we were anxious to keep our lead and be first at the mooring place. To run upon a sand bank at such a moment was like being plunged suddenly into cold water. Our sail flapped furiously. The men rushed to the punting poles. Four jumped overboard and shoved with all the might of their shoulders. By the time we got off, however, the other boats had crept up half a mile nearer, and we had hard work to keep them from pressing closer on our heels. At length the last corner was rounded, and the great temple stood straight before us. The façade, sunk in the mountainside like a huge picture in a mighty frame, was now quite plain to see. The black speck was no longer a porthole but a lofty doorway. Last of all, though it was night and they were still not much less than a mile away, the four Colossi came out, ghost-like, vague and shadowy in the enchanted moonlight. Even as we watched them they seemed to grow, to dilate, to be moving towards us out of the silvery distance. It was drawing on towards midnight when the filet at length ran in close under the great temple. Content with what they had seen from the river, the rest of the party then went soberly to bed, but the painter and the writer had no patience to wait till morning. Almost before the mooring rope could be made fast they had jumped ashore and begun climbing the bank. They went and stood at the feet of the Colossi and on the threshold of that vast portal beyond which was darkness. The great statues towered above their heads, the river glittered like steel in the far distance. There was a keen silence in the air and towards the east the southern cross was rising. To the strangers who stood talking there with bated breath the time, the place, even the sound of their own voices seemed unreal. They felt as if the whole scene must fade with the moonlight and vanish before morning.