 THE CENTRAL FIGURE OF EGYPTIAN HISTORY HAS ALWAYS BEEN, PROBABLY ALWAYS WILL BE, RAMASIS II. He holds this place partly by right, partly by accident. He was born to greatness, he achieved greatness, and he had borrowed greatness thrust upon him. It was his singular destiny not only to be made a posthumous usurper of glory, but to be forgotten by his own name and remembered in a variety of aliases. As Cessosis, as Ossimandius, as Cessostris, he became credited in course of time with all the deeds of all the heroes of the new empire, beginning with Tutmost III, who preceded him by three hundred years, and ending with Cessonc, the captor of Jerusalem, who lived four centuries after him. Modern science, however, has repaired this injustice, and while disclosing the long-lost names of a brilliant succession of sovereigns has enabled us to ascribe to each the honors which are his due. We know now that some of these were greater conquerors than RAMASIS II. We suspect that some were better rulers, yet the popular hero keeps his ground. What he has lost by interpretation on the one hand he has gained by interpretation on the other, and the beau-sabreur of the third Salyur papyrus remains to this day the representative pharaoh of a line of monarchs whose history covers a space of fifty centuries, and whose frontiers reached at one time from Mesopotamia to the ends of the Sudan. The interest that one takes in RAMASIS II begins at Memphis, and goes on increasing all the way up the river. It is a purely living, a purely personal interest, such as one feels in Athens for Pericles, or in Florence for Lorenzo the Magnificent. Other pharaohs but languidly affect the imagination. This and Amenhotep are to us as Darius, or Artaxerxes, shadows that come and go in the distance. But with the second RAMASIS we are on terms of respectful intimacy. We seem to know the man, to feel his presence, to hear his name in the air. His features are as familiar to us as those of Henry VIII or Louis XIV. His cartouches meet us at every turn. According to those who do not read the hieroglyphic character, those well-known signs convey by sheer force of association the name and style of RAMASIS, beloved of Amen. This being so, the traveler is ill-equipped who goes through Egypt without something more than a mere guidebook knowledge of RAMASIS II. He is, as it were, content to read the argument and miss the poem. In the desolation of Memphis, in the shattered splendor of Thebes he sees only the ordinary pathos of ordinary ruins. As for Abu Simbel, the most stupendous historical record ever transmitted from the past to the present, it tells him a but half-intelligible story. Holding to the merest thread of explanation he wanders from hall to hall, lacking altogether that potent charm of foregone association which no Murray can furnish. For average Frenchman, straying helplessly through Westminster Abbey under the conduct of the verger, has about as vague a conception of the historical importance of the things he sees. What is true of the traveler is equally true of those who take their vile vicariously in connection with Moody. If they are to understand any description of Abu Simbel, they must first know something about RAMASIS II. Let us, then, while the filet lies moored in the shadow of the rock of Abshek, review, as summarily as may be, the leading facts of this important reign. Such facts, that is to say, as are recorded in inscriptions, papyri, and other contemporary monuments. RAMASIS II was the son of Settie I, the second pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty, and of a certain princess Tua, described on the monuments as royal wife, royal mother, and heiress and sharer of the throne. She is supposed to have been of the ancient royal line of the preceding dynasty, and so to have had, perhaps, a better right than her husband to the double crown of Egypt. Through her at all events RAMASIS II seems to have been in some sense born a king, equal in rank if not in power with his father. His rights, moreover, were fully recognized by Settie, who accorded him royal and divine honors from the hour of his birth, or in the language of the Egyptian historians, while he was yet in the egg. The great dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Osiris at Abidos relates how his father took the royal child in his arms, when he was yet little more than an infant, showed him to the people as their king, and caused him to be invested by the great officers of the palace with the double crown of the two lands. The same inscription states that he was a general from his birth, and that, as a nursing, he commanded the bodyguard and the brigade of chariot fighters. But these titles must, of course, have been purely honorary. At twelve years of age he was formally associated with his father upon the throne. And by the gradual retirement of Settie I from the cares of active government, the whole royalty of Ramesses became, in the course of the next ten or fifteen years, an undivided responsibility. He was probably about thirty when his father died, and it is from this time that the years of his reign are dated. In other words, Ramesses II, in his official records, counts only from the period of his sole reign, and the year of the death of Settie is the year one of the monumental inscriptions of his son and successor. In the second, fourth, and fifth years of his monarchy, he personally conducted campaigns in Syria, more than one of the victories then achieved being commemorated on the rock-cut tablets of Narel Keb near Beirut, and that he was by this time recognized as a mighty warrior is shown by the Stella of Dhaka, which dates from the third year and celebrates him as terrible in battle, the bull powerful against Ethiopia, the griffin furious against the Negroes, whose grip has put the mountaineers to flight. The events of his second campaign, undertaken two years later in order to reduce to obedience the revolted tribes of Syria and Mesopotamia, are immortalized in the poem of Pentar. It was on this occasion that he fought his famous single-handed fight against overwhelming odds in the sight of both armies under the walls of Quresh. Three years later he carried fire and sword into the land of Canaan, and in his eleventh year, according to inscriptions, yet extant upon the ruined pylons of the Ramaceum at Thebes, he took, among other strong places on sea and shore, the fortresses of Ascalan and Jerusalem. The next important record transports us to the twenty-first year of his reign. Ten years have now gone by since the fall of Jerusalem, during which time a fluctuating frontier warfare has probably been carried on, to the exhaustion of both armies. Kedasira, Prince of Kedas, sues for peace. An elaborate treaty is there upon framed, whereby the said prince and Ramaces, chief of rulers who fixes his frontiers where he pleases, pledge themselves to a strict offensive and defensive alliance, and to the maintenance of good will and brotherhood forever. The treaty, we are told, was engraved for the ketan prince upon a tablet of silver adorned with the likeness of the figure of Sutek, the great ruler of heaven, while for Ramaces Meramen it was graven on a wall adjoining the great hall at Karnak, where it remains to this day. According to the last clause of this curious document, the contracting parties enter also into an agreement to deliver up to each other the political fugitives of both countries, providing at the same time for the personal safety of the offenders. Whosoever shall be so delivered up, says the treaty, himself, his wives, his children, let him not be smitten to death, moreover, let him not suffer in his eyes, in his mouth, in his feet, moreover, let not any crime be set up against him. This is the earliest instance of an extradition treaty upon record, and it is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of the clemency with which international law was, at that time, administered. Finally, the convention between the sovereigns is placed under the joint protection of the gods of both countries. Sutek of Kedah, Amin of Egypt, and all the thousand gods, the gods male and female, the gods of the hills of the rivers of the great sea, of the winds and the clouds, of the land of Kedah and of the land of Egypt. The peace now concluded would seem to have remained unbroken throughout the rest of the long reign of Ramesses II. We hear at all events of no more wars, and we find the king married presently to a Ketan princess, who, in deference to the gods of her adopted country, takes the official name of Ma'at-Iri Niferu-ra, or contemplating the beauties of Ra. The names of two other queens, Nefertari and Astinefert, are also found upon the monuments. These three were probably the only legitimate wives of Ramesses II, though he must also have been the lord of an extensive harem. His family at all events, as recorded upon the walls of the temple of Wadisuba, amounted to no less than 170 children, of whom 111 were princes. This may have been a small family for a great king three thousand years ago. It was but the other day, comparatively speaking, that Lephthia saw and talked with old Hassan Qashif of Der, the same petty ruler who gave so much trouble to Belzoni, Burkhart and other early travelers, and he, like a patriarch of old, had in his day been the husband of sixty-four wives and the father of something like two hundred children. For forty-six years after the making of the Ketan treaty, Ramesses the great lived at peace with his neighbors and tributaries. The evening of his life was long and splendid. It became his passion and his pride to found new cities, to raise dykes, to dig canals, to build fortresses, to multiply statues, obelisks and inscriptions, and to erect the most gorgeous and costly temples in which man ever worshipped. To the monuments founded by his predecessors he made additions so magnificent that they dwarfed the designs they were intended to complete. He caused artesian wells to be pierced in the stony bed of the desert. He carried on the canal begun by his father and opened the waterway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. No enterprise was too difficult, no project too vast for his ambition. As a child, says the Stella of Dhaka, he superintended the public works and his hands laid their foundations. As a man he became the supreme builder. Of his gigantic structures only certain colossal fragments have survived the ravages of time, yet those fragments are the wonder of the world. CHAPTER XV To estimate the cost at which these things were done is now impossible. Every temple, every palace represented a hectic home of human lives. Slaves from Ethiopia, captives taken in war, Syrian immigrants settled in the Delta were alike pressed into the service of the state. We know how the Hebrews suffered and to what an extremity of despair they were reduced by the tasks imposed upon them. Yet even the Hebrews were less cruelly used than some who were kidnapped beyond the frontiers. And from their homes without hope of return, driven in herds to the mines, the quarries, and the brick fields, these hapless victims were so dealt with that not even the chance of desertion were open to them. The Negroes from the south were systematically drafted to the north, the Asiatic captives were transported to Ethiopia. Those who labored underground were goaded on without rest or respite till they fell down in the mines and died. Romses II was the Pharaoh of the captivity and that Manepta, his son and successor was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, are now among the accepted presumptions of Egyptological science. The Bible and the monuments confirm each other upon these points, while both are again corroborated by the results of recent geographical and philological research. The treasure cities, Pythom and Romses, which the Israelites built for Pharaoh with bricks of their own making, are the Potom and Pyrromesies of the inscriptions, and both have recently been identified by Mishir Naveya in the course of his excavations conducted in 1883 and 1886 for the Egypt Exploration Fund. The discovery of Pythom, the ancient biblical treasure city of the first chapter of Exodus, has probably attracted more public attention and been more widely discussed by European savants than any archaeological event since the discovery of Nineveh. It was in February 1883 that Mishir Naveya opened the well-known mound of Tel El-Maskuta on the south bank of the new sweetwater canal in the Wadi Tumilat, and there discovered the foundations and other remains of a fortified city of the kind known in Egyptian as Bekhen or Storfort. This Bekhen, which was surrounded by a wall thirty feet in thickness, proved to be about twelve acres in extent. In one corner of the enclosure were found the ruins of a temple built by Romses II. The rest of the area consisted of a labyrinth of subterraneous rectangular cellars or store chambers constructed of sun-dried bricks of large size and divided by walls varying from eight to ten feet in thickness. In the ruins of the temple were discovered several statues more or less broken, a colossal hawk inscribed with the royal ovals of Romses II, and other works of art dating from the reigns of Osorkan II, Nectinabo, and Ptolemy Philadelphus. The hieroglyphic legends engraved upon the statues established the true value of the discovery by giving both the name of the city and the name of the district in which the city was situate, the first being Potom, Pithom, the Abode of Tum, and the second being Sukkot, Sukkoth, so identifying Potom in the district of Sukkot, with Pithom, the treasure-city built by the forced labor of the Hebrews, and Sukkoth, the region in which they made their first halt, ongoing forth from the land of bondage. Even the bricks with which the Great Wall and the walls of the store chambers are built bear eloquent testimony to the toil of the suffering colonists, and confirm in its minutest details the record of their oppression, some being duly needed with straw, others when the straw was no longer forthcoming being mixed with the leafage of a reed common to the marshlands of the delta, and the remainder when even this substitute ran short, being literally bricks without straw molded of mere clay crudely dried in the sun. The researches of Mr. Naveel further showed that the temple to Tum, founded by Ramesses II, was restored or rebuilt by Ozorkan II of the twenty-second dynasty, whilst at a still higher level were discovered the remains of a Roman fortress. That Pithom was still an important place in the time of the Ptolemies is proved by a large and historically important tablet found by Mr. Naveel in one of the store chambers, where it had been thrown in with other sculptures and rubbish of various kinds. This table records repairs done to the canal, an expedition to Ethiopia, and the foundation of the city of Arisnoe. Not less important from a geographical point of view was the finding of a Roman milestone which identifies Pithom with Hero, Heroopolis, where according to the Septuagint Joseph went forth to meet Jacob. This milestone gives nine Roman miles as the distance from Heroopolis to Klisma. A very curious manuscript lately discovered by Signore Gamerini in the Library of Arezzo shows that even so late as the fourth century of the Christian era, this ancient walled enclosure, the camp or aero-castra of the Roman period, the Pithom of the Bible, was still known to Pius Pilgrims as the Pithom built by the children of Israel, that the adjoining town external to the camp at that time established within the old Pithom boundaries was known as Heroopolis, and that the town of Ramoses was distant from Pithom about twenty Roman miles. As regards Pa Ramoses, the other treasure city of Exodus, it is conjecturally but not positively identified by Mr. Naveel, identified by Mr. Naveel with the mound of Soft Elhenna, the scene of his explorations in 1886. That Soft Elhenna was identical with Kess or Goshen, the capital of the land of Goshen, has been unequivocally demonstrated by the discoverer, and that it was also known in the time of Ramoses II as Pa Ramoses is shown to be highly probable. There are remains of a temple built of black basalt, with pillars, fragments of statues, and the like all inscribed with the cartouches of Ramoses II, and the distance from Pithom is just twenty Roman miles. It was from Pa Ramoses that Ramoses II set out with his army to attack the Confederate princes of Asia Minor, then lying in ambush near Kadesh, and it was thither that he returned in triumph after the great victory. A contemporary letter, written by one panbisa, a scribe, narrates in glowing terms the beauty and abundance of the royal city, and tells how the damsels stood at their doors in holiday apparel, with nosegays in their hands and sweet oil upon their locks, on the day of the arrival of the war god of the world. This letter is in the British Museum. Other letters written during the reign of Ramoses II have by some been supposed to make direct mention of the Israelites. I have obeyed the orders of my master, writes the scribe Kauser to his superior Bakim Ta, being bidden to serve out the rations to the soldiers, and also to the Aperiu, Hebrews, who quarry stone for the palace of King Ramoses Mir Amen. A similar document written by a scribe named Kenyaman, and couched in almost the same words, shows these Aperiu on another occasion to have been quarrying for a building on the southern side of Memphis, in which case Tura would be the scene of their labours. These invaluable letters written on Papyrus in the hieratic character are in good preservation. They were found in the ruins of Memphis, and now form a part of the treasures of the Museum of Layden. They bring home to us with startling nearness the events and actors of the Bible narrative. We see the toilers at their task, and the overseers reporting them to the directors of public works. They extract from the quarry those huge blocks which are our wonder to this day. Harnessed to rude sledges, they drag them to the riverside and embark them for transport to the opposite bank. Some are so large and heavy that it takes a month to get them down from the mountains to the landing place. Other laborers are elsewhere making bricks, digging canals, helping to build the great wall which reached from Pelesium to Heliopolis, and strengthening the defenses not only of Pitham and Ramesses, but of all the cities and forts between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Their lot is hard, but not harder than the lot of other workmen. They are well fed, they intermarry, they increase and multiply. The season of their great oppression is not yet come. They make bricks, it is true, and those who are so employed must supply a certain number daily. But the straw is not yet withheld, and the task, though perhaps excessive, is not impossible. For we are here in the reign of Ramesses II, and the time when Menefta shall succeed him is yet far distant. It is not till the king dies that the children of Israel sigh by reason of the bondage. There are in the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Bibliothèque Nationale some much older papyri than those two letters of the late in collection, some as old indeed as the time of Joseph, but none perhaps of such peculiar interest. In these, the scribes Khazer and Kenyamin seem still to live and speak. What will we not give for a few more of their letters? These men knew Memphis in its glory, and had looked upon the face of Ramesses the Great. They might even have seen Moses and his youth, while yet he lived under the protection of his adopted mother, a prince among princes. Khazer and Kenyamin lived and died and were mummied between three and four thousand years ago, yet these frail fragments of papyrus have survived the wreck of ages, and the quaint writing with which they are covered is intelligible to ourselves as to the functionaries to whom it was addressed. The Egyptians were eminently business-like, and kept accurate entries of the keep and labor of their workmen and captives. From the earliest epoch of which the monuments furnish record, we find an elaborate bureaucratic system in full operation throughout the country. Even in the time of the pyramid builders there are ministers of public works, inspectors of lands, lakes, and quarries, secretaries, clerks, and overseers enumerable. From all these we may be sure were required strict accounts of their expenditure as well as reports of the work done under their supervision. Specimens of Egyptian bookkeeping are by no means rare. The Louvre is rich in memoranda of the kind, some relating to the date tax, others to the transport and taxation of corn, the payment of wages, the sale and purchase of land for burial, and the like. If any definite and quite unmistakable news of the Hebrews should ever reach us from Egyptian sources, it will almost certainly be through the medium of documents such as these. To draw up anything like an exhaustive catalogue of his known architectural works would be equivalent to writing an itinerary of Egypt and Ethiopia under the nineteenth dynasty. His designs were as vast as his means appeared to have been unlimited. From the Delta to Gebel Barkle he filled the land with monuments dedicated to his own glory and to the worship of the gods. From the Delta to Gebel Barkle he filled the land with monuments dedicated to his own glory and to the worship of the gods. Upon thieves, Abidos and Tannis he lavished structures of surpassing magnificence. In Nubia, at the places now known as Garef Hussein, Wadi Subua, Der and Abu Simbul, he was the author of temples and the founder of cities. These cities which would probably be better described as provincial towns have disappeared, and but for the mention of them in various inscriptions we should not even know that they had existed. Who shall say how many more have vanished, leaving neither trace nor record? A dozen cities of Ramazes may yet lie buried under some of those nameless mounds which follow each other in such quick succession along the banks of the Nile, in Middle and Lower Egypt. Only yesterday, as it were, the remains of what would seem to have been a magnificent structure decorated in a style absolutely unique, where accidentally discovered under the mounds of Tel El Yahuda about twelve miles to the northeast of Cairo. There are probably fifty such mounds, none of which have been opened in the delta alone, and it is no exaggeration to say that there must be some hundreds between the Mediterranean and the First Cataract. An inscription found of late years at Abidos shows that Ramazes II reigned over his great kingdom for the space of sixty-seven years. It is thou, says Ramazes IV, addressing himself to Osiris, it is thou who wilt rejoice me with such length of rain as Ramazes II, the great God, in his sixty-seven years. It is thou who wilt give me the long duration of this great rain. If we only knew at what age Ramazes II succeeded to the throne, we should, by help of this inscription, know also the age at which he died. No such record has, however, transpired, but a careful comparison of the length of time occupied by the various events of his reign, and above all the evidence of age afforded by the mummy of this great Pharaoh, discovered in 1886, show that he must have been very nearly, if not quite, a centenarian. Thou madeest designs, while yet in the age of infancy, says the Stella of Dhaka. Thou were to boy wearing the sidewalk, and no monument was erected, and no order was given without thee. Thou were to youth aged ten years, and all the public works were in thy hands, laying their foundations. These lines translated literally cannot, however, be said to prove much. They certainly contain nothing to show that this youth of ten was, at the time alluded to, sole king and ruler of Egypt, that he was the titleer king in the hereditary sense from his birth and during the lifetime of his father, is now quite certain. That he should, as a boy, have designed public buildings and superintended their construction is extremely probable. The office was one which might well have been discharged by a crown prince who delighted in architecture, and made it his peculiar study. It was, in fact, a very noble office, an office which from the earliest days of the ancient empire had recently been confided to princes of the royal blood, but it carried with it no evidence of sovereignty. The presumption, therefore, would be that the Stella of Dhaka, dating as it does from the third year of the sole reign of Ramazes II, alludes to a time long since past, when the king as a boy held office under his father. The same inscription as we have already seen makes reference to the victorious campaign in the south. Ramazes is addressed as the bull powerful against Ethiopia, the griffin furious against the Negroes, and that the events hereby alluded to must have taken place during the first three years of his sole reign is proved by the date of the tablet. The great dedicatory inscription of Abido's shows, in fact, that Ramazes II was prosecuting a campaign in Ethiopia, at the time when he received intelligence of the death of his father, and that he came down the Nile northwards in order, probably, to be crowned at Thebes. Now the famous sculptures of the commemorative chapel at Bayt Al-Weli relate expressly to the events of this expedition, and as they are executed in that refined and delicate style which especially characterizes the barrelief work of Guernah, of Abido's, of all those buildings which were either erected by Sedi I or begun by Sedi and finished during the early years of Ramazes II, I venture to think we may regard them as contemporary, or very nearly contemporary with the scenes they represent. In any case it is reasonable to conclude that the artist employed on the work would know something about the events and purses delineated. In any case it is reasonable to conclude that the artists employed on the work would know something about the events and persons delineated, and that they would be guilty of no glaring inaccuracies. All doubt as to whether the dates refer to the associated reigns of Sedi and Ramazes, or to the sole reign of the latter vanish, however, when in these same sculptures we find the conqueror accompanied by his son, Prince Amin Herkapeshev, who is of an age not only to bear his part in the field, but afterwards to conduct an important ceremony of state on the occasion of the submission and tribute offering of the Ethiopian commander. Such is the unmistakable evidence of the Ba reliefs at Beit El-Weli, as those who cannot go to Beit El-Weli may see and judge for themselves by means of the admirable castes of these great tableaus which line the walls of the Second Egyptian Room at the British Museum. To explain away Prince Amin Herkapeshev would be difficult. We are accustomed to a certain amount of courtly exaggeration on the part of those who record with pen or pencil the great power of the pharaohs. We expect to see the king always young, always beautiful, always victorious. It seems only right and natural that he should never be less than twenty, and sometimes more than sixty feet in height. But that any flatterer should go so far as to credit a lad of thirteen with a son at least as old as himself is surely quite incredible. Lastly there is the evidence of the Bible. Joseph being dead in the Israelites established there comes to the throne a pharaoh who takes alarm at the increase of this alien race and who seeks to check their two rapid multiplication. He not only oppresses the foreigners but ordains that every male infant born to them in their bondage shall be cast into the river. This pharaoh is now universally relieved to be Ramaziz II. Then comes the old sweet familiar Bible story that we know so well. Moses is born, cast adrift in the Ark of Bullrushes, and rescued by the king's daughter. He becomes to her as a son. Although no dates are given it is clear that the new pharaoh has not been long upon the throne when these events happen. It is equally clear that he is no mere youth. He is old in the uses of statecraft, and he is the father of a princess of whom it is difficult to suppose that she herself was an infant. On the whole then we can but conclude that Ramaziz II, though born a king, was not merely grown to manhood, but wedded and the father of children already past the period of infancy before he succeeded to the sole exercise of sovereign power. This is, at all events, the view taken by Professor Maspero, who expressly says in the latest edition of his Histoire Ancien that Ramaziz II, when he received news of the death of his father, was then in the prime of life and surrounded by a large family, some of whom were of an age to fight under his command. Bruges places the birth of Moses in the sixth year of the reign of Ramaziz II. This may very well be. The four-score years that elapsed between that time and the time of the Exodus correspond with sufficient exactness to the chronological data furnished by the monuments. Moses would thus see out the sixty-one remaining years of the king's long life and release the Israelites from bondage towards the close of the reign of Manipha, who sat for about twenty years on the throne of his fathers. The correspondence of dates this time leaves nothing to be desired. The sassastras of Diodorus Seculus went blind and died by his own hand, which act says the historian, as it is conformed to the glory of his life, was greatly admired by his people. We are here evidently in the region of pure fable. This side was, by no means, an Egyptian but a classical virtue. Just as the Greeks hated age, the Egyptians reverenced it, and it may be doubted whether a people who seemed always to have passionately desired length of days would have seen anything to admire in a willful shortening of that most precious gift of the gods. With the one exception of Cleopatra, the death of Nicrotus the Rosie being also of Greek, and therefore questionable origin, no Egyptian sovereign is known to have committed suicide. An even Cleopatra, who was half Greek by birth, must have been influenced to the act by Greek and Roman example. Dismissing, then, altogether this legend of blindness and self-slaughter, it must be admitted that of the death of Rameses II we know nothing certain. Such are very briefly the leading facts of the history of this famous manor. In fact, it is true that in the 18th century, in the 18th century, most of the people who lived in Pentecostally treated they would expand into a volume. Even then, however, one would ask and ask in vain what manner of man he was. Every attempt to evolve his personal character from the scanty data is, in fact, a mere exercise of fancy. That he was personally valiant may be. His pride was evidently boundless. Every temple which he erected was a monument to his own glory. Every colossus was a trophy. Every inscription a peyon of self-praise. At Abu Simbel, at Der, at Girf Hussain, he seated his own image in the sanctuary among the images of the gods. There are even instances in which he is depicted under the two-fold aspect of royalty and divinity. Rameses the Pharaoh burning incense and rameses the deity. For the rest it is safe to conclude that he was neither better nor worse than the general run of oriental despots, that he was ruthless in war, prodigal in peace, rapacious of booty, and unsparing in the exercise of almost boundless power. Such pride and such despotism were, however, in strict accordance with immemorial precedent, and with the temper of the age in which he lived. The Egyptians would seem beyond all doubt to have believed that their king was always, in some sense, divine. They wrote hymns and offered up prayers to him, and regarded him as the living representative of deity. His princes and ministers habitually addressed him in the language of worship. Even his wives, who ought to have known better, are represented in the performance of acts of religious adoration before him. I ATIAFIED BELIEVED HIMSELF A GOD. Part I. We came to Abu Simbel on the night of the 31st of January, and we left at sunset on the 18th of February. Of these eighteen clear days we spent fourteen at the foot of the Rock of the Great Temple, called in the old Egyptian tongue the Rock of Abyshek. The remaining four, taken at the end of the first week and the beginning of the second, were passed in the excursion to Wadi-Halfa and back. By thus dividing the time our long sojourn was made less monotonous for those who had no special work to do. Meanwhile it was wonderful to wake every morning close under the steep bank and without lifting one's head from the pillow to see that row of giant faces so close against the sky. They showed unearthly enough by moonlight, but not half so unearthly as in the gray of dawn. At that hour the most solemn of the twenty-fourth they wore a fixed and fatal look that was little less than appalling. As the sky warmed this awful look was succeeded by a flesh that mounted and deepened like the rising flesh of life. For a moment they seemed to glow, to smile, to be transfigured. Then came a flash, as of thought itself. It was the first instantaneous flash of the risen sun. It lasted less than a second. It was gone almost before one could say that it was there. The next moment mountain, river, and sky were distinct in the steady light of day, and the Colossi, mere Colossi now, sat serene and stony in the open sunshine. Every morning I waked in time to witness that daily miracle. Every morning I saw those awful brethren pass from death to life, from life to sculptured stone. I brought myself almost to believe, at last, that there must sooner or later come some one sun rise when the ancient charm would snap asunder, and the giants must arise and speak. Stupendous as they are, nothing is more difficult than to see the Colossi properly. Standing between the rock and the river, one is too near. Stationed on the island opposite, one is too far off, while from the sand slope only a side view is obtainable. Hence, for want of a fitting standpoint, many travelers have seen nothing but deformity in the most perfect face handed down to us by Egyptian art. One recognizes in it the negro, and one the Mongolian type, while another admires the fidelity with which the Nubian characteristics have been seized. Yet in truth the head of the young Augustus is not cast in a loftier mold. These statues are portraits, portraits of the same man four times repeated, and that man is Ramaziz the Great. Now Ramaziz the Great, if he was as much like his portraits as his portraits are like each other, must have been one of the handsomest men, not only of his day, but of all history. Wheresoever we meet with him, whether in the fallen Colossus at Memphis, or in the cyanide torso of the British Museum, or among the innumerable barreliefs of Thebes, Abidos, Gourna, and Bat-Elweli, his features, though bearing in some instances the impressive youth and in others of maturity, are always the same. The face is oval, the eyes are long, prominent, and heavy-litted, the nose is slightly aquiline, and characteristically depressed at the tip. The nostrils are open and sensitive, the under lip projects, the chin is short and square. Here, for instance, is an outline from a barrelief at Bat-Elweli. The subject is commemorative of the King's First Campaign. A beardless youth fired with the rage of battle he clutches a captive by the hair and lifts his mace to slay. In this delicate and dantesque face which lacks as yet the fullness and repose of the later portraits, we recognize all the distinctive traits of the older Ramses. Here again is a sketch from Abidos, in which the King, although he has not yet ceased to wear the side-lock of youth, is seen with a boyish beard, and looks some three or four years older than in the previous portrait. It is interesting to compare these heads with the accompanying profile of one of the carotid Colossi inside the great temple of Abusimbal, and all three with one of the giant portraits of the façade. This last, whether regarded as a marvel of size or of portraiture, is the chef-d'oeuvre of Egyptian sculpture. We here see the great King in his prime. His features are identical with those of the head at Bat-Elweli, but the contours are more amply filled in and the expression is altogether changed. The man is full fifteen or twenty years older. He has outlived that rage of early youth. He is no longer impulsive but implacable. A god-like serenity, an almost superhuman pride, an immutable will, breathed from the sculptured stone. He has learned to believe his prowess irresistible, and himself almost divine. If he now raised his arm to slay, it would be with the stern placidity of a destroying angel. The annexed woodcut gives the profile of the southernmost Colossus, which is the only perfect or very near-perfect one of the four. The original can be correctly seen from but one point of view, and that point is where the sand-slope meets the northern buttress of the façade, at a level just parallel with the beards of the statues. It was dense that the present outline was taken. The sand-slope is steep and loose and hot to the feet. More disagreeable climbing it would be hard to find, even in Nubia, but no traveler who refuses to encounter this small hardship need believe that he has seen the faces of the Colossus. Viewed from below, this beautiful portrait is foreshortened out of all proportion. It looks unduly wide from ear to ear, while the lips and lower part of the nose show relatively larger than the rest of the features. The same may be said of the great cast in the British Museum. Couped up at the end of a narrow corridor and lifted not more than fifteen feet above the ground, it is carefully placed so as to be wrong from every point of view and shown to the greatest possible disadvantage. The artist who wrought the original statues were, however, embarrassed by no difficulties of focus, dawned by no difficulties of scale. Giants themselves they summoned these giants from out of the solid rock, and endowed them with superhuman strength and beauty. They sought no quarried blocks of cyanite or granite for their work. They fashioned no models of clay. They took a mountain and fell upon it like titans and hollowed and carved it as though it were a cherry stone, and left it for the feebler men of after ages to marvel at forever. One great hall and fifteen spacious chambers they hewed out from the heart of it, then smoothed the rugged precipice towards the river, and cut four huge statues with their faces to the sunrise, two to the right and two to the left of the doorway, there to keep watch to the end of time. These tremendous waters sit sixty-six feet high without the platform under their feet. They measure across the chest twenty-five feet and four inches, from the shoulder to the elbow, fifteen feet and six inches, from the inner side of the elbow joint to the tip of the middle finger, fifteen feet, and so on in relative proportion. If they stood up they would tower to a height of at least eighty-three feet, from the soles of their feet to the tops of their enormous double crowns. Nothing in Egyptian sculpture is perhaps quite so wonderful as the way in which these Abu symbol artists dealt with the thousands of tons of material to which they here gave human form. Consummate masters of effect they knew precisely what to do and what to leave undone. These were portrait statues, therefore they finished the heads up to the highest point consistent with their size, but the trunk and the lower limbs they regarded from a decorative rather than a statuesque point of view. As a decoration it was necessary that they should give size and dignity to the façade. As a result of this, the body of the body, which had been designed consequently, was here subordinated to the general effect of breadth of massiveness of repose. Considered thus the Colossia are a triumph of treatment. Side by side they sit, placid and majestic, their feet a little apart, their hands resting on their knees. Shapely though they are, those huge legs look scarcely inferior in girth to the great columns of Karnak. The outline of the Peronius longus are indicated rather than developed. The toe nails and toe joints are given in the same bold and general way, but the fingers, because only the tips of them could be seen from below, are treated on block. Their faces show the same largeness of style. The little dimple which gives such sweetness to the corners of the mouth, and the tiny depression in the lobe of the ear are in fact circular cavities as large as saucers. How far this treatment is consistent with the most perfect delicacy and even finesse of execution may be gathered from the sketch. The nose there shown in profile is three feet and a half in length. The mouth so delicately curved is about the same in width. Even the sensitive nostril, which looks ready to expand with the breadth of life, exceeds eight inches in length. The ear, which is placed high and is well detached from the head, measures three feet and five inches from top to tip. A recent writer who brings sound practical knowledge to bear upon the subject is of opinion that the Egyptian sculptors did not even point their work beforehand. If so, then the marvel is only so much the greater. The men who working in so coarse and friable a material could not only give beauty and finish to heads of that size, but could with barbaric tools hew them out ab initio from the natural rock where the Michelangeloes of their age. It has already been said that the last Ramesses to the southward is the best preserved. His left arm and hand are injured and the head of the Ureas sculptured on the front of the shunt is gone, but with these exceptions the figure is whole, as fresh in surface, as sharp in detail as on the day it was completed. The next is shattered to the waist. His head lies at his feet, half buried in sand. The third is nearly as perfect as the first, while the fourth has lost not only the whole beard in the greater part of the Ureas, but has both arms broken away and a big cavernous hole in the front of the body. From the double crowns of the two last, the top ornament is also missing. It looks a mere knob, but it measures eight feet in height. Such an effect is the size of these four figures produced on the mind of the spectator that he scarcely observes the fractures they have sustained. I do not remember to have even missed the head and body of the shattered one, though nothing is left of it above the knees. Those huge legs and feet covered with ancient inscriptions, some of Greek, some of Venetian origin, tower so high above the heads of those who look at them from below that one scarcely thinks of looking higher still. The figures are naked to the waist and clothed in the usual striped tunic. On their heads they wear the double crown and on their necks rich collars of kabocha and drops cut in very low relief. The feet are bare of sandals and the arms of bracelets, but in the front of the body just where the customary belt and buckle would come are deep holes in the stone, such as might have been made to receive rivets supposing the belts to have been made of bronze or gold. On the breast just below the necklace and on the upper part of each arm are cut in magnificent ovals between four and five feet in length the ordinary cartouches of the king. These were probably tattooed upon his person in the living flesh. Some have supposed that these statues were originally colored and that the color may have been effaced by the ceaseless shifting and blowing of the sand. Yet the drift was probably at its highest when Burkhardt discovered the place in 1813, and on the two heads that were still above the surface he seems to have observed no traces of color. Neither can the keenest eye detect any visage of that delicate film of stucco with which the Egyptians invariably prepared their surfaces for painting. Perhaps the architects were for once content with the natural color of the sandstone, which is here very rich and varied. It happens also that the Colossi come in a light colored vein of the rock, and so sit relieved against a darker background. Towards noon when the level of the façade has just passed into shade and the sunlight still strikes upon the statues, the effect is quite startling. The whole thing, which is then best seen from the island, looks like a huge phoenix cameo cut in high relief. A statue of Ra to whom the temple is dedicated stands some twenty feet high in a niche over the doorway, and is supported on either side by a Ba relief portrait of the king in an attitude of worship. Next above these comes a superb hieroglyphic inscription reaching across the whole front. Above the inscription a band of royal cartouches. Above the cartouches a freeze of sitting apes. Above the apes, last and highest, some fragments of a cornice. The height of the hole may have been somewhat over a hundred feet. Wherever it has been possible to introduce them as decoration, we see the ovals of the king. Under those sculptured on the platforms and over the door I observe the hieroglyphic character nub, which in conjunction with the sign known as the determinative of metals signifies gold, nub. But when represented as here without the determinative stands for nubia, the land of gold. This addition, which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere in connection with the cartouches of Vromises II, is here used in an eraldic sense as signifying the sovereignty of nubia. The relative position of the two temples of Abu Simbel has been already described, how they are excavated in two adjacent mountains and divided by a cataract of sand. The front of the small temple lies parallel to the course of the Nile, here flowing in a northeasterly direction. The facade of the great temple is cut in the flank of the mountain and faces due east. Thus the colossi towering above the shoulder of the sanddrift catch as it were a side view of the small temple and confront vessels coming up the river. As for the sanddrift it curiously resembles the glacier of the Rhone. In size, in shape, in position, in all but color and substance it is the same. Pent in between the rocks at the top it opens out like a fan at the bottom. In this its inevitable course it slants downward across the facade of the great temple. Forever descending, drifting, accumulating, it wages the old stealthy war and, unhasting, unresting, labors grain by grain to fill the hollowed chambers and bury the great statues and wrap the whole temple in a winding sheet of golden sand, so that the place thereof shall know it no more. It had very nearly come to this when Burkhart went up, eighty, eighteen, thirteen. The top of the doorway was then thirty feet below the surface. Whether the sand will ever reach that height again must depend on the energy with which it is combated. It can only be cleared as it accumulates. To avert it is impossible. Backed by the illimitable wastes of the Libyan desert the supply from above is inexhaustible. Come it must, and come it will to the end of time. The drift rose to the lap of the northernmost colossus and half way up the legs of the next when the filet lay at Abu Simbel. The doorway was clear, however, almost to the threshold, and the sand inside was not more than two feet deep in the first hall. The whole facade, we were told, had been laid bare, and the interior swept and garnished when the Empress of the French, after opening the Suez Canal in eighteen sixty-nine, went up the Nile as far as the second cataract. By this time most likely that yellow carpet lies thick and soft in every chamber, and is fast tilting up the doorway again. End of section forty-six. A thousand miles up the Nile, section forty-seven. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. CHAPTER XVI. ABU SIMBEL PART II How well I remember the restless excitement of our first day at Abu Simbel. While the morning was yet cool the painter and the writer wandered to and fro, comparing and selecting points of view and superintending the pitching of their tents. The painter planted his on the very brink of the bank, face to face with the Colossi and the open doorway. The writer perched some forty feet higher on the pitch of the sand slope, so getting a side view of the façade and a peep of distance looking up the river. To fix the tent up there was no easy matter. It was only by sinking the tent pole in a hole filled with stones that it could be trusted to stand against the steady push of the North Wind, which at this season is almost always blowing. Meanwhile the travellers from the other Dahabiyas were tramping backwards and forwards between the two temples, filling the air with laughter and waking strange echoes in the hollow mountains. As the day wore on, however, they returned to their boats, which one by one spread their sails and bore away for Wadi-Halfa. When they were fairly gone and we had the marvellous place all to ourselves we went to see the temples. The smaller one, though it comes first in the order of sailing, is generally seen last, and seen therefore to disadvantage. To eyes fresh from the abode of Ra, the abode of Hothor, looks less than its actual size, which is, in fact, but little inferior to that of the temple at Durr. A first hall measuring some forty feet in length by twenty-one in width leads to a transverse corridor, two side chambers and a sanctuary, seven feet square, at the upper end of which are the shattered remains of a cow-headed statue of Hathor. Six square pillars, as at Durr, support what, for want of a better word, one must call the ceiling of the hall, though the ceiling is, in truth, the super-incumbent mountain. In this arrangement, as in the general character of the bar-relief sculptures which cover the walls and pillars, there is much simplicity, much grace, but nothing particularly new. The façade, however, is a daring innovation. To those who have not seen the place the annexed illustration is worth pages of description, and to describe it in words only would be difficult. Here the whole front is but a frame for six recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and lifelike, seems to be walking straight out from the heart of the mountain. These statues, three to the right and three to the left of the doorway, stand thirty feet high and represent Ramaziz II and Nefertari his queen. Mutilated as they are, the male figures are full of spirit, and the female figures full of grace. The queen wears on her head the plumes and disc of Hathor. The king is crowned with the shunt and with a fantastic helmet dormed with plumes and horns. They have their children with them, the queen her daughters, the king his sons, infants of ten feet high whose heads just reach to the parental knee. The walls of these six recesses as they follow the slope of the mountain form massive buttresses, the effect of which is wonderfully bold in light and shadow. The doorway gives the only instance of a porch that we saw in either Egypt or Nubia. The superb hieroglyphs which cover the faces of these buttresses and the front of this porch are cut half a foot deep into the rock and are so large that they can be read from the island in the middle of the river. The tale they tell, a tale retold in many varied turns of old Egyptian style, upon the architraves within, is singular and interesting. Ramaziz, the strong and truth the beloved of Amun, says the outer legend, made this divine abode for his royal wife, Nefertari whom he loves. The legend within after enumerating the titles of the king records that his royal wife who loves him, Nefertari the beloved of Mott, constructed for him this abode in the mountain of the pure waters. On every pillar, in every act of worship pictured on the walls, even in the sanctuary, we find the names of Ramaziz and Nefertari coupled and inseparable. In this double dedication and in the unwanted tenderness of the style one seems to detect traces of some event, perhaps of some anniversary, the particulars of which are lost forever. It may have been a meeting, it may have been a parting, it may have been a prayer answered or a vow fulfilled. We see at all events that Ramaziz and Nefertari desired to leave behind them an imperishable record of the affection which united them on earth, and which they hoped would reunite them in Aminti. What more do we need to know? We see that the queen was fair, that the king was in his prime. We divine the rest and the poetry of the place at all events is ours. Even in these barren solitudes there is wafted to us a breath from the shores of old romance. We feel that love once passed this way, and that the ground is still hollowed where he trod. We hurried on to the great temple without waiting to examine the lesser one in detail. A solemn twilight reigned in the first hall, beyond which all was dark. Eight Colossi, four to the right and four to the left, stand ranged down the center, bearing the mountain on their heads. Their height is twenty-five feet. With hands crossed on their breasts they clasped the flail and crook, emblems of majesty and dominion. It is the attitude of Osiris, but the face is the face of Ramaziz II. Seen by this dim light, shadowy, mournful, majestic, they look as if they remembered the past. Beyond the first hall, as a second hall supported on four square pillars. Beyond this again, a transverse chamber, the walls of which are covered with colored barreliefs of various gods. Last of all, the sanctuary. Here, side by side, sit four figures larger than life. Ptah, Aminra, Ra, and Ramaziz deified. Before them stands an altar, in shape a truncated pyramid, cut from the solid rock. Traces of color yet linger on the garments of the statues, while in the walls on either side are holes and grooves such as might have been made to receive a screen of metalwork. The air in the sanctuary was heavy with an acrid smoke, as if the priests had been burning some strange incense and were only just gone. For this illusion we were indebted to the visitors who had been there before us. They had lit the place with magnesium wire, the vapor of which lingers long in these unventilated vaults. To settle down, then and there, to a steady investigation of the wall sculptures was impossible. We did not attempt it. Wandering from hall to hall, from chamber to chamber, now trusting to the faint gleams that straggled in from without, now stumbling along the light of a bunch of candles tied to the end of a stick, we preferred to receive those first impressions of vastness, of mystery, of gloomy magnificence which are the more profound for being somewhat vague in general. Scenes of war, of triumph, of worship, pass before our eyes like the incidents of a panorama. Here the king, born along at full gallop by plumed steeds, gorgeously capparizond, draws his mighty bow and attacks a battle-minted fortress. The besieged, some of whom are transfixed by his tremendous arrows, supplicate for mercy. They are Assyrian people, and are by some identified with the northern Hittites. Their skin is yellow, and they wear the long hair and beard, the fillet, the rich robe, fringed cape, and embroidered baldric, with which we are now familiar in the Nineveh sculptures. A man driving off cattle in the foreground looks as if he had stepped out of one of the tablets in the British Museum. Ramazes, meanwhile, towers, swift and godlike above the crowd. His coarsers are of such immortal strain as were the coarsers of Achilles. His sons, his whole army, chariot and horse, follow headlong at his heels. All is movement in the splendor of battle. Farther on we see the king returning in state, preceded by his prisoners of war. Tied together in gangs they stagger as they go, with heads thrown back and hands uplifted. These, however, are not Assyrians, but Abyssinians and Nubians, so true to the type, so thick-lipped, flat-nosed and wooly-headed that only the pathos of the expressions saves them from being ludicrous. It is naturalness pushed to the verge of caricature. A little farther still, and we find Ramazes leading a string of these captives into the presence of Amun-Ra, Mott and Connus. Amun-Ra, weird and unearthly, with his blue complexion and towering plumes. Mott, wearing the crown of Upper Egypt. Connus, by a subtle touch of flattery depicted with the features of the king. Again to the right and left of the entrance, Ramazes thrice the size of life, slays a group of captives of various nations. To the left, Amun-Ra, to the right, Ra-Ramazes approve and accept the sacrifice. In the second hall we see, as usual, the procession of the sacred bark. Patah, Khem, and Bost, gorgeous and many-colored garments, glean dimly like figures in faded tapestry from the walls of the transverse corridor. But the wonder of Abu-Simbal is the huge subject on the north side of the Great Hall. This is a monster battle-piece which covers an area of fifty-seven feet and seven inches in length, by twenty-five feet four inches in height, and contains over eleven hundred figures. Even the heraldic cornice of cartouches and afts, which runs round the rest of the ceiling, is omitted on this side, so that the wall is literally filled with the picture from top to bottom. Fully to describe this huge design would take many pages. It is a picture gallery in itself. It represents not a single action, but a whole campaign. It sets before us with Homeric simplicity the pomp and circumstance of war, the incidents of camp life, and the accidents of the open field. We see the enemy's city with its battle-minted towers in triple-mote, the besieger's camp and the pavilion of the king, the march of infantry, the shock of chariots, the hand-to-hand melee, the flight of the vanquished, the triumph of Pharaoh, the bringing in of the prisoners, the counting of the hands of the slain. A great river winds through the picture from end to end and almost surrounds the invested city. The king and his chariot pursues a crowd of fugitives along the bank. Some are crushed under his wheels. Some plunge into the water and are drowned. Behind him a moving wall of shields and spears advances with rhythmic step to the seared phalanx, while yonder where the fight is thickest we see chariots overturned, men dead and dying, and riderless horses making for the open. Meanwhile the besieged send out mounted scouts, and the country folk drive their cattle to the hills. A grand freeze of chariots charging at full gallop divides the subject lengthwise and separates the Egyptian camp from the field of battle. The camp is square and enclosed, apparently, in a palisade of shields. It occupies less than one sixth part of the picture and contains about a hundred figures. Within this narrow space the artist has brought together an astonishing variety of incidents. The horses feed in rows from a common manger, or wait their turn and impatiently paw the ground. Some are lying down. One just unharnessed scampers round the enclosure. Another, making off with the empty chariot at his heels, is intercepted by a couple of grooms. Other grooms bring buckets of water slung from the shoulders on wooden yolks. A wounded officer sits apart, his head resting on his hand, and an orderly comes in haste to bring him news of the battle. Another, hurt, apparently in the foot, is having the wound dressed by a surgeon. Two detachments of infantry marching out to reinforce their comrades in action are met at the entrance to the camp by the royal chariot returning from the field. Ramaziz drives before him some fugitives, who are trampled down, seized, and dispatched upon the spot. In one corner stands a row of objects that look like joints of meat, and near them are a small altar and a tripod-brazier. Elsewhere, a couple of soldiers with a big bowl between them sit on their heels and dip their fingers in the mess precisely as every fella does to this day. Meanwhile it is clear that Egyptian discipline was strict, and that the soldier who transgressed was as abjectly subject to the rule of stick as his modern descendant. In no less than three places do we see this time-honored institution in full operation, the superior officer energetically flourishing his staff, the private taking his punishment with characteristic disrelish. In the middle of the camp watched over by his keeper lies Ramaziz-tamed lion, while close against the royal pavilion a hostile spy is surprised and stowed by the officer on guard. The pavilion itself is very curious. It is evidently not a tent but a building, and was probably an extemporaneous construction of crude brick. It has four arched doorways and contains in one corner an object like a cabinet, which has two sacred hocks for supporters. This object, which is in fact almost identical with the hieroglyphic emblem used to express a royal panagyria festival, stands no doubt for the private oratory of the king. Five figures kneel before it in adoration. To enumerate all or half the points of interest in this amazing picture would ask altogether too much space. Even to see it with time at command in all the help that candles and magnesium torches can give is far from easy. The relief is unusually low and the surface, having originally been covered with stucco, is purposely roughened all over with tiny chisel marks, which painfully confuse the details. Nor is this all. Owing to some kind of saline ooze in that part of the rock, the stucco has not only peeled off but the actual surface is injured. It seems to have been eaten away, just as iron is eaten by rust. A few patches at here, however, in places and retain the original coloring. The river is still covered with blue and white zigzags to represent water. Some of the fighting groups are yet perfect, and two very beautiful royal chariots, one of which is surmounted by a richly ornamented parasol canopy, are as fresh and brilliant as ever. The horses throughout are excellent. The chariot freeze is almost panathenaic in its effect of multitudinous movement, while the horses in the camp of romacies, for naturalness and variety of treatment, are perhaps the best that Egyptian art has to show. It is worth noting also that a horseman, that rarer avis, occurs some four or five times in different parts of the picture. The scene of the campaign is laid in Syria. The river of blue and white zigzags is the Orantes. The city of the besieged is Kadesh, or Kades. The enemy are the Keta. The whole is, in fact, a grand picture epic of the events immortalized in the poem of Pentar. That poem, which Monsieur Derujet has described as a sort of Egyptian Iliad. The comparison would, however, apply to the picture with greater force than it applies to the poem. Pentar, who was in the first place a courtier and in the second place a poet, has sacrificed everything to the prominence of his central figure. He is intent upon the glorification of the king, and his poem, which is a mere peon of praise, begins and ends with the prowess of romacies mere amen. If, then, it is to be called an Iliad, it is an Iliad from which everything that does not immediately concern Achilles is left out. The picture, on the contrary, though it shows the hero in combat and triumph, and always of colossal proportions, yet has space for a host of minor characters. The episodes in which these characters appear are essentially Homeric. The spy is surprised and slain as Dolan was slain by Ulysses. The men feast and fight and are wounded, just like the long-haired sons of Achaea, while their horses, loosed from the yoke, eat white barley and oats, hard by their chariots, waiting for the dawn. CHAPTER XVI. Like Homer, too, the artist of the battle-piece is careful to point out the distinguishing traits of the various combatants. The Kedah go three in a chariot, the Egyptians only two. The Kedah wear a moustache and a scalplock, the Egyptians pride themselves on a clean shave and cover their bare heads with ponderous wigs. The Sardinian contingent cultivate their own thick hair, whiskers and mustachios, and their features are distinctly European. They also wear the curious helmet, surmounted by a ball and two spikes, by which they may always be recognized in the sculptures. These Sardinians appear only in the border-freeze next to the floor. The sand had drifted up just at that point and only the top of one fantastic helmet was visible above the surface. Not knowing in the least what this might belong, we set the men to scrape away the sand, and so quite by accident uncovered the most curious and interesting group in the whole picture. The Sardinians, in Egyptians, Shardana, seem to have been naturalized prisoners of war drafted into the ranks of the Egyptian army, and are the first European people whose name appears on the monuments. There is but one hour in the twenty-four at which it is possible to form any idea of the general effect of this vast subject, and that is its sunrise. Then only does the pure day stream in through the doorway and temper the gloom of the side aisles with light reflected from the sunlit floor. The broad divisions of the picture and the distribution of the masses may then be dimly seen. The details, however, require candlelight, and can only be studied a few inches at a time. Even so it is difficult to make out the upper groups without the help of a ladder. Salome mounted on a chair and provided with two long sticks slashed together could barely hold his little torch high enough to enable the rider to copy the inscription on the middle tower of the fortress of Kadesh. It is fine to see the sunrise on the front of the great temple, but something still finer takes place on certain mornings of the year in the very heart of the mountain. As the sun comes up above the eastern hill-tops, one long, level beam strikes through the doorway, pierces the inner darkness like an arrow, penetrates to the sanctuary, and falls like fire from heaven upon the altar at the feet of the gods. No one who has watched for the coming of that shaft of sunlight can doubt that it was a calculated effect, and that the excavation was directed at one special angle in order to produce it. In this way raw to whom the temple was dedicated may be said to have entered in daily, and by a direct manifestation of his presence to have approved the sacrifices of his worshippers. I need scarcely say that we did not see half the wall sculptures or even half the chambers that first afternoon at Abu Simbel. We rambled to and fro, lost in wonder and content to wonder, like rustics at a fair. We had, however, ample time to come again and again and learn it all by heart. The rider went in constantly and at all hours, but most frequently at the end of the day sketching, when the rest were walking or boating in the cool of the late afternoon. It is a wonderful place to be in alone, a place in which the very darkness and silence are old, and in which time himself seems to have fallen asleep. Wondering to and fro among these sculptured halls, like a shade among shadows, one seems to have left the world behind, to have done with the teachings of the present, to belong oneself to the past. The very gods assert their ancient influence over those who question them in solitude. Seen in the fast, deepening, gloom of evening, they look instinct with supernatural life. There were times when I should scarcely have been surprised to hear them speak, to see them rise from their painted thrones and come down from the walls. There were times when I felt I believed in them. There was something so weird and awful about the place, and it became so much more weird and awful the farther one went in, that I rarely ventured beyond the first hall when quite alone. One afternoon, however, when it was a little earlier and therefore a little lighter than usual, I went to the very end, and sat at the feet of the gods in the sanctuary. All at once I cannot tell why, for my thoughts just then were far away, it flashed upon me that a whole mountain hung, ready, perhaps to cave in above my head. Seized by a sudden panic such as one feels in dreams, I tried to run, but my feet dragged and the floors seemed to sink under them. I felt I could not have called for help, though it had been to save my life. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to say that the mountain did not cave in, and that I had my fright for nothing. It would have been a grand way of dying all the same and a still grander way of being buried. My visits to the great temple were not always so dramatic. I sometimes took salami, who smoked cigarettes when not on active duty, or held a candle while I sketched patterns of cornices, head dresses of kings and gods, designs of necklaces and bracelets, heads of captives and the like. Sometimes we explored the side chambers. Of these there are eight, pitch-dark and excavated at all kinds of angles. Two or three are surrounded by stone benches cut in the rock, and in one the hieroglyphic inscriptions are part cut, part sketched in black and left unfinished. As this temple is entirely the work of Ramaziz II and betrays no sign of having been added to by any of his successors, these evidences of incompleteness would seem to show that the king died before the work was ended. I was always under the impression that there were secret places yet undiscovered in these dark chambers, and salami and I were always looking for them. At Dendurah, at Edfu, at Medinet Habu, at Filet, there have been found crypts in the thickness of the walls and recesses under the pavements, for the safekeeping of treasure in time of danger. The rock-cut temples must also have had their hiding-places, and those would doubtless take the form of concealed cells in the walls or under the floors of the side chambers. To come out from these black holes into the twilight of the great hall and see the landscape set, as it were, in the ebb and frame of the doorway was alone worth the journey to Abu Simbel. The sun being at such times in the west, the river, the yellow sand-island, the palms and tamarists opposite, and the mountains of the eastern desert were all flooded with a glory of light and color to which no pen or pencil could possibly do justice. Not even the mountains of Moab in helmet-hunt scapegoat were so warm with rose and gold. Thus our days passed at Abu Simbel, the workers working, the idlers idling, the strangers from the outer world now and then coming and going. The heat on shore was great, especially in the sketching tents, but the north breeze blew steadily every day from about an hour after sunrise till an hour before sunset, and on board the Dahabiyah it was always cool. The happy couple took advantage of this good wind to do a good deal of boating, and by judiciously timing their excursions, contrived to use the tale of the day's breeze for their trip out, and the strong arms of four good rowers to bring them back again. In this way they managed to see the little rock-cut temple of Fahreg, which the rest of us unfortunately missed. On another occasion they paid a visit to a certain sheikh who lived at a village about two miles south of Abu Simbel. He was a great man as Nubian magnets go. His name was Hassan ebn Rashwan el Qashif, and he was a grandson of that same old Hassan Qashif who was vice-region of Nubia in the days of Burkhart and Belzoni. He received our happy couple with distinguished hospitality, killed a sheep in their honor and entertained them for more than three hours. The meal consisted of an endless succession of dishes, all of which, like that bugbear of our childhood, the hated air with variations, went on repeating the same theme under a multitude of disguises, and whether roast, boiled, stewed, or minced, served on skewers smothered in rice or drowned in sour milk, were always mutton au fond. We now despaired of ever seeing a crocodile, and but for a trail that our men discovered on the island opposite we should almost have ceased to believe that there were crocodiles in Egypt. The marks were quite fresh when we went to look at them. The creature had been basking high and dry in the sun, and this was the point at which he had gone down again to the river. The damp sand at the water's edge had taken the mold of his huge, fleshy paws, and even of the jointed armor of his tail, though this last impression was somewhat blurred by the final rush with which he had taken to the water. I doubt if Robinson Caruso, when he saw the famous footprint on the shore, was more excited than we of the filet at the sight of this genuine and undeniable trail. As for the idle man, he flew at once to arms and made ready for the fray. He caused a shallow grave to be dug for himself a few yards from the spot, then went and lay in it for hours together, morning after morning, under the full blaze of the sun, flat, patient alert, with his gun ready cocked and a palm-all budget up his back. It was not his fault if he narrowly escaped sunstroke and had his labor for his reward. That crocodile was too clever for him and took good care never to come back. Our sailors, meanwhile, though well-pleased with an occasional holiday, began to find Abu Zimbul monotonous. As long as the bag-stone stayed the two crews met every evening to smoke and dance and sing their quaint rounded lays together. But when rumors came of the wonderful things already done this winter above Wadi-Halfa, rumors that represented the second cataract as a populous solitude of crocodiles, then our faithful consort slipped away one morning before sunrise, and the filet was left companionless. Seeing that the men's time hung heavy on their hands, our painter conceived the idea of setting them to clean the face of the northernmost Colossus, still disfigured by the plaster left on it when the great cast was taken by Mr. Hay more than half a century before. This happy thought was promptly carried into effect. A scaffolding of spars and oars was at once improvised, and the men, delighted as children at play, were soon swarming all over the huge head, just as the carvers may have swarmed over it in the days when Ramazes was king. All they had to do was to remove any small lumps that might yet adhere to the surface, and then tint the white patches with coffee. This they did with bits of sponge tied to the end of sticks, but Rais Hassan, as a mark of dignity, had one of the painter's old brushes, of which he was immensely proud. It took them three afternoons to complete the job, and we were all sorry when it came to an end. To see Rais Hassan artistically touching up a gigantic nose almost as long as himself, Riscali and the cook boy, staggering to and fro with relays of coffee, brewed thick and slab for the purpose, Salome perched cross-legged like some complacent imp on the towering rim of the great shent overhead. The rest chattering and skipping about the scaffolding like monkeys was, I venture to say, a sight more comic than has ever been seen at Abu Simbel before or since. Ramazes' appetite for coffee was prodigious. He consumed, I know not, how many gallons a day. Our cook stood aghast at the demand made upon his stores. Never before had he been called upon to provide for a guest whose mouth measured three feet and a half in width. Still the result justified the expenditure. The coffee proved a capital match for the sandstone, and though it was not possible wholly to restore the uniformity of the original surface, we at least succeeded in obliterating those ghastly splotches, which for so many years have marred this beautiful face as with the unsightliness of leprosy. What with boating, fishing, lying in wait for crocodiles, cleaning the colossus, and filling reams of thin letter paper to friends at home, we got through the first week quickly enough. The painter and the writer working hard, meanwhile, in their respective ways. The painter on his big canvas in front of the temple, the writer shifting her little tent as she listed. Now, although the most delightful occupation in life is undoubtedly sketching, it must be admitted that the sketch or adabu symbol works under difficulties. Foremost among these comes the difficulty of position. The great temple stands within about twenty-five yards of the brink of the bank, and the lesser temple within as many feet, so that to get far enough from one's subject is simply impossible. The present writer sketched the small temple from the deck of the Dahabiya, there being no point of view obtainable on shore. Next comes the difficulty of color. Everything, except the sky and the river, is yellow. Yellow, that is to say, with a difference, yellow ranging through every gradation of orange, maize, apricot, gold, and buff. The mountains are sandstone, the temples are sandstone, the sandslope is powdered sandstone from the sandstone desert. In all these objects the scale of color is necessarily the same. Even the shadows, glowing with reflected light, give back tempered repetitions of the dominant hue. Hence it follows that he who strives, however humbly, to reproduce the facts of the scene before him is compelled, bon gré, malgré, to execute what some young painters would nowadays call a symphony in yellow. Lastly, there are the minor inconveniences of sun, sand, wind, and flies. The whole place radiates heat and seems almost to radiate light. The glare from above and the glare from below are alike intolerable. Dazzle, blinded, unable even to look at his subject without the aid of smoke-colored glasses, the sketcher whose tent is pitched upon the sandslope over against the great temple enjoys a foretaste of cremation. When the wind blows from the north, which at this time of the year is almost always, the heat is perhaps less distressing, but the sand is maddening. It fills your hair, your eyes, your water bottles, silts up your color box, dries into your skies, and reduces your Chinese white to a gritty paste the color of salad dressing. As for the flies, they have a morbid appetite for watercolors. They follow your wet brush along the paper, leave their legs in the yellow ochre, and plunge with avidity into every little pool of cobalt as it is mixed ready for use. Nothing disagrees with them, nothing poisons them, not even olive green. It was a delightful time, however, delightful alight for those who worked and those who rested, and these small troubles counted for nothing in the scale. Yet it was pleasant all the same to break away for a day or two and be off for Wadi Halfa. CHAPTER XVII A fresh breeze, a full sail, and the consciousness of a holiday well-earned carried us gaily along from Abu Sembel to Wadi Halfa. We started late in the afternoon of the first day, made about twelve miles before the wind dropped, and achieved the remaining twenty-eight miles before noon the next day. It was our last trip on the Nile under canvas. At Wadi Halfa the filet was doomed to be dismantled. The big sail that had so long been our pride and delight would there be taken down, and our good boat, her grace and swiftness gone at one fell swoop, would become a mere lumbering barge, more suggestive of civic outings on the Thames than of Cleopatra's galley. For some way beyond Abu Sembel the western bank is fringed by a long line of volcanic mountains, as much alike in height, size, and shape as a row of martello towers. They are divided from one another by a series of perfectly uniform sand drifts, while on the rounded top of each mountain, thick as the currents on the top of a certain cake, known to school boys by the endearing name of black caps, lies a layer of the oddest black stones in the world. Having more than once been to the top of the rock of Absek, which is the first large mountain of the chain, and strewn in the same way, we recognized the stones and knew what they were like. In color they are purplish black, tinged here and there with dull red. They ring like clinkstone when struck, and in shape are most fantastic. El picked up some like petrified bunches of grapes. Others are twisted and rhythm like the Vesuvian lava of 1871. They lie loose upon the surface and are of all sizes, some being as small as currents and others as large as quartered loaves. Speaking as one having no kind of authority, I should say that these stones are unquestionably a fiery parentage. One seems to see how, boiling and bubbling in a state of fusion, they must have been suddenly checked by contact with some cooler medium. Where the chain ends about three or four miles above Abu Simbel, the view widens and a host of outlying mountains are seen scattered over an immense plain reaching for miles into the western desert. On the eastern bank Calat-Ada, a huge rambling Roman citadel going to solitary ruin on the last water-washed precipice to the left, brings the opposite range to a like end, and abuts on a similar plain also scattered over with detached peaks. The scene here is desolately magnificent. A large island covered with palms divides the Nile in two branches, each of which looks as wide as the whole river. An unbounded distance opens away to the silvery horizon. On the banks there is no verdure, neither is there any sign of human toil. Nothing lives, nothing moves, save the wind and the river. Of all the strange peaks we have yet seen, the mountains here about are the strangest. Alone or in groups they start up here and there from the deserts on both sides, like the pieces on a chessboard. They are, for the most part, conical, but they are not extinct craters, such as are the volcanic cones of Carrasco and Dacca. Seeing how they all rose to about the same height and were alike capped with that mysterious coosh of shining black stones, the writer could not help fanciing that, like the isolated Rochet de Cornyai and Rochet de Saint-Michel at Puy. They might be but fragments of a rocky crust, rent and swept away at some indefinitely remote period of the world's history, and that the level of their present summits might represent perhaps the ancient level of the plain. As regards form they are weird enough for the wildest geological theories. All taper more or less towards the top. One is four-sided like a pyramid, another, in shape like a truncated cone, looks as if crowned with a pagoda summerhouse. A third seems to be surrounded by a mosque and cupola, a fourth is scooped out in tiers of arches, a fifth is crowned, apparently, with a carn of piled stones, and so on with variations as endless as they are fantastic. A geologist might perhaps account for these caprices by showing how fire and earthquake and deluge had here succeeded each other, and how after being first covered with volcanic stones and then split into chasms, the valleys thus opened had, by and by, been traversed by torrents, which wore away the softer parts of the rock and left the harder standing. Some way beyond Calat-Adda, when the Abu-Simble range and the Palm Island have all but vanished in the distance, and the lonely peak, called the Mountain of the Sun, Gebel S. Shemes, has been left far behind, we come upon a new wonder, namely upon two groups of scattered tamale, one on the eastern, one on the western bank. Not volcanic forms these, not even accidental forms if one may venture to form an opinion from so far off. They are of various size, some little, some big, all perfectly round and smooth, and covered with a rich greenish-brown alluvial soil. How did they come here? Who made them? What did they contain? The Roman ruin close by. The two hundred and forty thousand deserters who must have passed this way. The Egyptian and Ethiopian armies that certainly poured their thousands along these very banks, and might have fought many a battle on this open plain, suggest all kinds of possibilities, and fill one's head with visions of varied arms and jewels and siniary urns. We are more than half-minded to stop the boat and land that very moment, but are content on second thoughts with promising ourselves that we will at least excavate one of the smaller hillocks on our way back. And now, the breeze, freshening, and the dahabia tearing gallantly along, we leave the tumuli behind and enter upon a still more desolate region, where the mountains recede farther than ever and the course of the river is interrupted by perpetual sandbanks. On one of these sandbanks just a few yards above the edge of the water lay a log of driftwood, apparently a battered old palm-trunk with some remnants of broken branches yet clinging to it, such an object in short as my American friends would very properly call a snag. Our pilot leaned forward on the tiller, put his finger to his lip, and whispered, Crocodile. The painter, the idle man, the writer, were all on deck, and not one believed him. They had seen too many of these snags already, and were not going to let themselves again be excited about nothing. The pilot pointed to the cabin where Elle and the little lady were indulging in that minor vice called afternoon tea. Sitte, said he, call Sitte, Crocodile. We examined the object through our glasses. We laughed the pilot to scorn. It was the worst imitation of a crocodile that we had yet seen. All at once the palm-trunk lifted up its head, cocked its tail, found its legs, set off running, wriggling, undulating down the slope with incredible rapidity, and was gone before we could utter an exclamation. We three had a bad time when the other two came up and found that we had seen our first crocodile without them. A sand bank which we passed next morning was scored all over with fresh trails and looked as if it had been the scene of a crocodile parliament. There must have been at least twenty or thirty members present at the sitting, and the freshness of the marks showed that they had only just dispersed. A keen and cutting wind carried us along the last thirty miles of our journey. We had supposed that the farther south we penetrated the hotter we should find the climate. Yet now strange to say we were shivering in sealskins under the most brilliant sky in the world, and in a latitude more southerly than that of Mecca or Calcutta. It was some compensation, however, to run at full speed past the dullest of Nile scenery, seeing only sand banks in the river, sand hills and sand flats on either hand, a disused chadoof or a skeleton boat rotting at the water's edge, a wind tormented dome-palm struggling for existence on the brink of the bank. The second cataract, part two. At a fatal corner about six miles below Wadi Halfa we passed a melancholy flotilla of dismantled Ahabiyas, the Faustit, the Zenobia, the Alice, the Manzura, all alike weather-bound and laid up helplessly against the wind. The Manzura, with Captain and Mrs. E. on board, had been three days doing these six miles, at which rate of progress they might reasonably hope to reach Cairo in about a year and a month. The palms of Wadi Halfa, blue with distance, came in to sight at the next bend, and by noon the filet was once more moored alongside the bagstones under a shore crowded with kajias, covered with bails and packing-cases, and, like the shores of Mahada and Aswan, populace with temporary huts. For here it is that traders going by water embark and disembark on their way to and fro Dangola and the first cataract. There were three temples, or at all events, three ancient Egyptian buildings once upon a time on the western bank over against Wadi Halfa. Now there are a few broken pillars, a solitary fragment of brick pylon, some remains of a flight of stone steps leading down to the river, and a wall of enclosure overgrown with wild pumpkins. These ruins, together with a rambling native con and a noble old sycamore, form a picturesque group backed by amber sandcliffs and mark the sight of a lost city belonging to the early days of Ustratessen III. The second, or great, cataract begins a little way above Wadi Halfa and extends over a distance of many miles. It consists, like the first cataract, of a secession of rocks and rapids, and is skirted for the first five miles or so by the sandcliff ridge which, as I have said, forms a background to the ruins just opposite Wadi Halfa. This ridge terminates abruptly in the famous precipice known as the Rock of Abusir. Only adventurous travelers bound for Dangola or Khartoum go beyond this point, and they, for the most part, take the shorter route across the desert from Khorosko. El and the rider would feign have hired camels and pushed on as far as Semna, which is a matter of only two days' journey from Wadi Halfa, and for people provided with sketching tents is one of the easiest of inland excursions. One may go to the Rock of Abusir by land or by water. The happy couple and the rider took two native boatmen, burst in the intricacies of the cataract, and went in the falooka. El and the painter preferred donkeying. Given a good breeze from the right quarter there is, as regards time, but little to choose between the two routes. No one, however, who has approached the Rock of Abusir by water, and seen it rise like a cathedral front from the midst of that labyrinth of rocky islets, some like clusters of basaltic columns, some crowned with crumbling ruins, some bleak and bare, some green with wild pomegranate trees, can doubt which is the more picturesque. Landing among the tamarists at the foot of the cliff we come to the spreading skirts of a sanddrift steeper and more fatiguing to climb than the sanddrift at Abusimbal. We do climb it, however, though somewhat soakly, and finding the donkey party perched upon the top are comforted with drafts of ice-cold lemonade brought in Akula from Wadi-Halfa. The summit of the Rock is a mere ridge, steep and overhanging towards east and south and carved all over with autographs in stone. Some few of these are interesting, but for the most part they record only the visits of the illustrious obscure. We found Belzoni's name, but looked in vain for the signatures of Burkhart, Chempolian, Lepceus, and Ampere. Owing to the nature of the ground and the singular clearness of the atmosphere, the view from this point seemed to me to be the most extensive I had ever looked upon. Yet the height of the Rock of Abusir is comparatively insignificant. It would count, but as a mole hill, if measured against some alpine summits of my acquaintance. I doubt whether it is as lofty as even the Great Pyramid. It is, however, a giddy place to look down from, and seems higher than it is. It is hard, now that we are actually here, to realize that this is the end of our journey. The cataract, an immense multitude of black and shining islets, among which the river, divided into hundreds of separate channels, spreads far and wide for a distance it is said of more than sixteen miles, foams at our feet. Foams and frets and falls, gushing smooth and strong where its course is free, murmuring hoarsely where it is interrupted, now hurrying, now loitering, here eddying in oily circles, there lying in still pools unbroken by a ripple, everywhere full of life, full of voices, everywhere shining to the sun. Northwards, where it winds away towards Abu Simbel, we see all the fantastic mountains of yesterday on the horizon. To the east, still bounded by outliers of the same disconnected chain, lies a rolling waste of dark and stony wilderness, trenched with innumerable valleys through which flow streams of sand. On the western side the continuity of the view is interrupted by the ridge which ends with Abu Seer. Southwards the Libyan desert reaches away in one vast undulating plain, tawny, arid monotonous, all sun, all sand, lit here and there with airy flashes of the Nile. Farthest of all, pale but distinct, on the outermost rim of the world, rise two mountain summits, one long, one dome-like. Our Nubians tell us that these are the mountains of Dangola. Comparing our position with that of the third cataract, as it appears upon the map, we come to the conclusion that these ghost-like silhouettes are the summits of Mount Fogo and Mount Arambo, two apparently parallel mountains situate on opposite sides of the river about ten miles below Hanuk, and consequently about one hundred and forty-five miles as the bird flies from the spot on which we are standing. In all this extraordinary panorama, so wild, so weird, so desolate, there is nothing really beautiful except the color. But the color is transcendent. Never, even in Egypt, have I seen anything so tender, so transparent, so harmonious. I shut my eyes, and it all comes before me. I see the amber of the sands, the pink and pearly mountains, the cataract, rocks all black and purple and polished, the dull gray palms that cluster here and there upon the larger islands, the vivid verdure of the tamarisks and pomegranates, the nile of greenish-brown flecked with heasty foam, overall the blue and burning sky permeated with light and palpitating with sunshine. I made no sketch. I felt that it would be ludicrous to attempt it. And now I feel that any endeavor to put the scene into words is a mere presumptuous effort to describe the indescribable. Words are useful instruments, but like the etching needle and the burren, they stop short at form. They cannot translate color. If a traveler pressed for time asked me whether he should or should not go as far as the second cataract, I think I should recommend him to turn back from Abu Zimbal. The trip must cost four days, and if the wind should happen to be unfavorable either way, it may cost six or seven. The forty miles of river that have to be twice traversed are the dullest on the nile. The cataract is but an enlarged and barren addition of the cataract between Aswan and Filet, and the great view, as I have said, has not that kind of beauty which attracts the general tourist. It has an interest, however, beyond and apart from that of beauty. It rouses one's imagination to a sense of the greatness of the nile. We look across a world of desert and see the river still coming from afar. We have reached a point at which all that is habitable and familiar comes abruptly to an end. Not a village, not a bean field, not a Shadoop, not a Sakia is to be seen in the plain below. There is no sail on those dangerous waters. There is no moving creature on those pathless sands. But for the telegraphic wires stalking ghost-like across the desert it would seem as if we had touched the limit of civilization, and were standing on the threshold of a land unexplored. Yet for all this we feel as if we were at only the beginning of the mighty river. We have journeyed well nigh a thousand miles against the stream, but what is that to the distance which still lies between us and the great lakes? And how far beyond the great lakes must we seek for the source that is even yet undiscovered? CHAPTER 17 THE SECOND CATERACT PART III We stayed at Wadi Halfa but one night, and paid but one visit to the cataract. We saw no crocodiles, though they are still plentiful among those rocky islets. The M.B.s who had been here a week were full of crocodile stories, and of Alfred's deeds of arms. He had stalked and shot a monster two days before our arrival, but the creature had rushed into the water when hit, waving its tail furiously above its head, and had neither been seen nor heard of since. Like Achilles the crocodile has but one vulnerable spot, and this is a small unarmored patch behind the forearm. He will take a good deal of killing even there, unless the bullet finds its way to a vital part, or is of the diabolical kind called explosive. Even when mortally wounded he seldom drops on the spot. With his last strength he rushes to the water and dies at the bottom. After three days the carcass rises and floats, and our friends were now waiting in order that Alfred might bag his big game. Too often, however, the poor brute either crawls into a hole or in his agony becomes entangled among weeds and comes up no more. For one crocodile bagged a dozen regained the river, and after lingering miserably under water die out of sight and out of reach of the sportsman. While we were climbing the rock of Abusir our men were busy taking down the big sail and preparing the filet for her long and ignomious journey downstream. We came back to find the manor laid along like a roof tree above our heads. The sail rolled up in a huge ball and resting on the roof of the kitchen, the small after-sail and yard hoisted on the main mast, the oars lashed six on each side and the lower deck a series of yawning chasms, every alternate plank being taken up so as to form seats and standing places for the rowers. Thus dismantled the Dahabiya becomes, in fact, a galley. Her oars are now her chief motive power, and a crew of steady rowers, having always the current to their favor, can do thirty miles a day. When, however, a good breeze blows from the south the small sail and the current are enough to carry the boat well along, and then the men reserve their strength for rowing by night when the wind has dropped. Sometimes, when it is a dead calm and the rowers need rest, the Dahabiya is left to her own devices and floats with the stream, now waltzing ludicrously in the middle of the river, now drifting sidewise like Mr. Winkle's horse, now sidling up to the east bank, now changing her mind and blundering over to the west, making upon average about a mile and a half or two miles an hour and presenting a pitiful spectacle of helpless imbecility. At other times, however, the headwind blows so hard that neither oars nor current avail, and then there is nothing for it but to lie under the bank and wait for better times. This was our sad case in going back to Abu Simbel. Having struggled with no little difficulty through the first five and twenty miles, we came to a deadlock about half way between Farris and Gabbalesh Shems. Carried forward by the stream, wind back by the wind, buffeted by the waves, and bumped incessantly by the rocking to and fro of the faluka, our luckless filet, after oscillating for hours within the space of a mile, was run at last into a sheltered nook, and there left in peace till the wind should change or drop. Imprisoned here for a day and a half, we found ourselves, fortunately, within reach of the tamuli which we had already made up our minds to explore. Making first for those on the east bank, we took with us, in the faluka, four men to row and dig, a fire-shovel, a small hatchet, an iron bar, and a large wicker basket, which were the only implements we possessed. What we wanted both then and afterwards, and what no Dahabiya should ever be without, were two or three good spades, a couple of picks, and a crowbar. Climbing to the top of one of the highest of these hillocks, we began by surveying the ground. The desert here is firm to the tread, flat, compact, and thickly strewn with pebbles. Of the fine yellow sand which characterizes the Libyan bank, there is little to be seen, and that little lies like snow in drifts and clefs and hollows, as if carried thither by the wind. The tamuli, however, are mounded of pure alluvial mold, smooth, solid, and symmetrical. We counted thirty-four of all sizes, from five to about five and thirty feet in height, and saw at least as many more on the opposite side of the river. Selecting one of about eight feet high, we then set the sailors to work, and although it was impossible with so few men and such insufficient tools to cut straight through the center of the mound, we at all events succeeded in digging down to a solid substratum of lumps of crude clay evidently molded by hand. Whether these formed only the foundation of the tumulus, or concealed a grave excavated below the level of the desert, we had neither time nor means to ascertain. It was something at all events to have convinced ourselves that the mounds were artificial. As we came away we met a Nubian peasant treading northwards. He was leading a sorry camel, had a white cockerel under his arm, and was followed by a frightened woman who drew her shawl over her face and cowered behind him at the side of the Inglasa. We asked the men what the mounds were and who made them, but he shook his head and said they had been there from old time. We then inquired by what name they were known in these parts, to which, urging his camel forward, he replied hesitatingly that they had a name, but he had forgotten it. Having gone a little way, however, he presently turned back, saying that he now remembered all about it, and that they were called the horns of Yakma. More than this we could not get from him. Who Yakma was, or how he came to have horns, or why his horns should take the form of Tumuli, was more than he could tell or we could guess. We gave him a small box sheesh, however, in return for this mysterious piece of information, and went our way with all possible speed, intending to row across and see the mounds on the opposite bank before sunset. But we had not calculated upon the difficulty of either threading our way among a chain of sandbanks, or going at least two miles farther north, so as to get round into the navigable channel at the other side. We, of course, tried the shorter way, and after running aground some three or four times, had to give it up, hoist our little sail and scud homewards as fast as the wind would carry us. Coming back thus, after an excursion in the Faluka, is one of the many pleasant things that one has to remember of the Nile. The sun has set, the afterglow has faded, the stars are coming out. Leaning back with a satisfied sense of something seen or done, one listens to the old dreamy chant of the rowers, and to the ripple under the keel. The palms meanwhile glide past and are seen in bronzed relief against the sky. Presently the big boat, all glittering with lights, looms up out of the dusk. A cheery voice hails from the poop. We glide under the boughs. Half a dozen smiling brown faces bid us welcome, and as many pairs of brown hands are outstretched to help us up the side. A savory smell is wafted from the kitchen. A pleasant vision of the dining saloon, with table-ready spread and lamps ready lit, flashes upon us through the open doorway. We are at home once more. Let us eat, drink, rest, and be merry, for to-morrow the hard work of sight-seeing and sketching begins again.