 A thousand miles up the Nile, section 17, this is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 6. Mania to Sioux, Part 2. As for the rock-cut tombs of Gebel Avufeda, they must number many hundreds. For nearly twelve miles the range runs parallel to the river, and throughout that distance the face of the cliffs is pierced with innumerable doorways. Some are small and square, twenty or thirty together, like rows of portholes. Others are isolated. Some are cut so high up that they must have been approached from above. Others again come close upon the level of the river. Some of the doorways are faced to represent jams and architraves. Some excavated laterally appear to consist of a series of chambers and are lit from without by small windows cut in the rock. One is approached by a flight of rough steps leading up from the water's edge, and another hewn high in the face of the cliff, just within the mouth of a little ravine, shows a simple but imposing façade supported by four detached pillars. No modern travelers seem to visit these tombs, while those of the old school, as Wilkinson, Shampoleon, etc., dismiss them with a few observations. Yet with the single exception of the mountains behind Thebes, there is not, I believe, any one spot in Egypt which contains such a multitude of sepulchre excavations. Many look, indeed, as if they might belong to the same interesting and early epic as those of Benny Hassan. I may hear mention that about half way, or rather less than half way, along the whole length of the range, I observed two large hieroglyph stela incised upon the face of a projecting mass of boldly rounded cliff at a height of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river. These stelae, apparently royal ovals and sculptured as unusual side by side, may have measured from twelve to fifteen feet in height, but in the absence of any near object by which to scale them, I could form but a rough guest as to their actual dimensions. The boat was just then going so fast that to sketch or take notes of the hieroglyphs was impossible. Before I could adjust my glass they were already in the rear, and by the time I had called the rest of the party together they were no longer distinguishable. Coming back several months later I looked for them again, but without success, for the intense midday sun was then pouring full upon the rocks, to the absolute obliteration of everything like shallow detail. While watching vainly, however, for the stela, I was compensated by the unexpected sight of a colossal baw relief high up on the northward face of a cliff standing, so to say, at the corner of one of those little recesses or culls to sac, which here and there break the uniformity of the range. The sculptured relief of this large subject was apparently very low, but owing to the angle at which it met the light, one figure which could not have measured less than eighteen or twenty feet in height, was distinctly visible. I immediately drew Elle's attention to the spot, and she not only discerned the figure without the help of a glass, but believed like myself that she could see traces of a second. As neither stela nor the baw relief would seem to have been observed by previous travelers, I may add for the guidance of others that the round and tower-like rock upon which the former are sculptured lies about a mile to the southward of the shake's tomb and palm tree, a strikingly picturesque bit which no one can fail to notice, and a little beyond some very large excavations near the water's edge, while the baw relief is to be found at a short distance below the Coptic convent and cemetery. Having for nearly twelve miles skirted the base of Gebel Abufeda by far the finest panoramic stretch of rock scenery on this side of the second cataract, the Nile takes an abrupt bend to the eastward, and thence flows through many miles of cultivated flat. On coming to this sudden elbow the wind, which had hitherto been carrying us along at a pace but little inferior to that of a steamer, now struck us full on the beam and drove the boat to shore with such violence that all the steersmen could do was just to run the filet's nose into the bank and steer clear of some ten or twelve native cangyas that had been driven in before us. The bagstones rushed in next, and presently a large iron-built dahabia, having come gallantly along under the cliffs with all sail set, was seen to make a vain struggle at the fatal corner, and then plunge headlong at the bank, like King Agib's ship upon the lodestone mountain. In prison here all the afternoon we exchanged visits of condolence with our neighbors in misfortune, had our ears nearly cut to pieces by the driving sand, and failed signally in the endeavour to take a walk on the shore. Still the fury of the storm went on increasing. The wind howled, the river raced in turbid waves, the sand drove in clouds, and the face of the sky was darkened as if by a London fog. Meanwhile one boat after another was hurried to shore, and before nightfall we numbered a fleet of some twenty-odd craft native and foreign. It took the united strength of both crews all next day to warp the filet and bagstones across the river by means of a rope and an anchor, an expedient that deserves special mention, not for its amazing novel tier ingenuity, but because our men declared it to be impracticable. Their fathers, they said, had never done it. Their fathers' fathers had never done it. Therefore it was impossible. Being impossible, why should they attempt it? They did attempt it, however, and much to their astonishment they succeeded. It was, I think, towards the afternoon of this second day when strolling by the margin of the river that we first made the acquaintance of that renowned insect, the Egyptian beetle. He was a very fine specimen of his race, nearly half an inch long in the back, as black and shiny as a scarab cut in jet, and busily engaged in the preparation of a large rissile of mud, which he presently began laboriously propelling up the bank. We stood and watched him for some time, half in aberration, half in pity. His rissile was at least four times bigger than himself, and to roll it up that steep incline to a point beyond the level of next summer's inundation was a labor of Hercules for so small a creature. One longed to play the part of the du-sex machina and carried up the bank for him, but that would have been a du-monde beyond his power of appreciation. We all know the old story of how this beetle lays its eggs by the river's brink, encloses them in a ball of moist clay, rolls the beetle to a safe place on the edge of the desert, buries it in the sand, and when his time comes dies content having provided for the safety of his successors. Hence his mythic fame, hence all the quaint symbolism that by degrees attached itself to his little person, and ended by investing him with a special sacredness which has often been mistaken for actual worship. Standing by thus, watching the movements of the creature, its untiring energy, its extraordinary muscular strength, its business-like devotion to the matter in hand, one sees how subtle a lesson the old Egyptian moralists had presented to them for contemplation, and with how fine a combination of wisdom and poetry they regarded this little black scarab, not only as an emblem of the creative and preserving power, but perhaps also of the immortality of the soul. As a type, no insect has ever had so much greatness thrust upon him. He became a hieroglyph, and stood for a word signifying both to be and to transform. His portrait was multiplied a million fold, sculptured over the portals of temples, fitted to the shoulders of a god, engraved on gems, molded in pottery, painted on sarcophagi and the walls of tombs, worn by the living, and buried with the dead. Every traveler on the Nile brings away a handful of the smaller scarabs, genuine or otherwise. Some may not particularly care to possess them, yet none can help buying them if only because other people do so, or to get rid of a troublesome dealer, or to give to friends at home. I doubt, however, if even the most enthusiastic scarab fanciers really feel, in all its force, the symbolism attaching to these little gems, or appreciate the exquisite naturalness of their execution, till they have seen the living beetle at its work. In Nubia, where the strip of cultivable land is generally but a few feet in breadth, the scarab's task is comparatively light, and the breed multiplies freely. But in Egypt he often has a wide plane to traverse with his burden, and is therefore scarce in proportion to the difficulty with which he maintains the struggle for existence. The scarab race in Egypt would seem to have diminished very considerably since the days of the pharaohs, and the time is not perhaps far distant, when the naturalist will look in vain for specimens on this side of the first cataract. As far as my own experience goes, I can only say that I saw scores of these beetles during the Nubian part of the journey, but that to the best of my recollection this was the only occasion upon which I observed one in Egypt. The Nile makes four or five more great bends between Gebel, Abu Fadah, and Siut, passing Manfalut by the way, which town lies some distance back from the shore. All things taken into consideration, the fitful wind that came and went continually, the tremendous zigzags of the river, the dead calm which befell us when only eight miles from Siut, and the long day of tracking that followed, with the town inside the whole way, we thought ourselves fortunate to get in by the evening of the third day after the storm. Those last eight miles are, however, for open, placid beauty as lovely in their way as anything north of Thebes. The valley is here very wide and fertile. The town, with its multitudinous minarets, appears first on one side and then on the other, according to the windings of the river. The distant, pinky mountains look almost as transparent as the air or the sunshine, while the banks unfold an endless succession of charming little subjects, every one of which looks as if it asked to be sketched as we pass. A Shadoof and a clump of palms, a triad of shaggy black buffaloes up to their shoulders in the river, and dozing as they stand, a wide-spreading sycamore fig in the shadow of which lie a man and a camel asleep, a fallen palm uprooted by the last inundation, with its fibrous roots yet clinging to the bank and its crest in the water, a group of shakes' tombs with glistening white cupolas relieved against a background of dark foliage, an old, disused waterwheel lying up sideways against the bank like a huge teetotem, and garlanded with wild tendrils of a gourd. Such are a few out of many bits by the way, which, if they offer nothing very new, at least at all events present the old material under fresh aspects, and in combination with a distance of such ethereal light and shade and such opalescent tenderness of tone, that it looks more like an air-drawn mirage than a piece of the world we live in. Like a mirage, too, that fairy town of Sioux, it seemed always to hover at the same unattainable distance, and after hours of tracking to be no nearer than at first, sometimes, indeed, following the long reaches of the river, we appear to be leaving it behind, and although, as I have said, we had eight miles of hard work to get to it, I doubt whether it was ever more than three miles distant as the bird flies. It was late in the afternoon, however, when we turned the last corner, and the sun was already setting when the boat reached the village of Hamra, which is the mooring place for Sioux. Siouxed itself with clustered cupolas and airy minarets, lying back in the plain at the foot of a great mountain pierced with tombs. Now it was in the bond that our crew were to be allowed twenty-four hours for making and baking bread at Sioux, Esna, and Aswan. No sooner, therefore, was the Dahabia moored than Rais Hassan and the Steersmen started away at full speed on two little donkeys to buy flour, while Mehmet Ali, one of our most active and intelligent sailors, rushed off to hire the oven. For here, at Esna and Aswan, there are large flower stores and public bakehouses for the use of sailors on the river, who make and bake their bread in large lots, cut it into slices, dry it in the sun, and preserve it in the form of rusks for months together. As prepared, it takes the place of ship biscuit, and it is so far superior to ship biscuit that it neither molds nor breeds the maggot, but remains good and wholesome to the last crumb. End of Section 17. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Section 18. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 6. Menea to Siut, Part 3. Siut, frequently written as Siut, is the capital of Middle Egypt, and has the best vizars of any town of the Nile. Its red and black pottery is famous throughout the country, and its pipe bowls, supposed to be the best in Egypt, being largely exported to Cairo, find their way not only to all parts of the Levant, but to every Algerine and Japanese shop in London and Paris. No lover of peasant pottery will yet have forgotten the Egyptian stalls in the ceramic gallery of the International Exhibition of 1871. All those quaint red vases and lustrous black tazas, all those exquisite little coffee services, those crocodile paperweights, those barrel-shaped and bird-shaped bottles came from Siut. There is a whole street of such pottery here in the town. Your dahabiya is scarcely made fast before a dealer comes on board and ranges his brittle wares along the deck. Others display their goods upon the bank. But the best things are only to be had in the bazaar, and not even in Cairo is it possible to find Siut wear so choice in color, form, and design as that which the two or three best dealers bring out, wrapped in soft paper when a European customer appears in the market. Besides the street of pottery, there is a street of red shoes, another of native and foreign stuffs, and the usual run of Saddler shops, kebab stalls, and Greek stores for the sale of everything in heaven or earth from third-rate cognac to patent wax vestas. The houses are of plastered mud or sun-dried bricks as at Mania. The thoroughfares are dusty, narrow, unpaved, and crowded. As at Mania. The people are one-eyed, dirty, and unfragrant as at Mania. The children's eyes are full of flies, and their heads are covered with sores as at Mania. In short, it is Mania over again on a larger scale, differing only in respect of its inhabitants, who, instead of being sullen, thievish, and unfriendly, are too familiar to be pleasant, and the most unappeasable beggars out of Ireland. So our mirage turned to sordid reality, and Ciut, which from a far off looked like the capital of dreamland, resolves itself into a big mud town as ugly and ordinary as its fellows. Even the minarets, so elegant from a distance, betray for the most part but rough masonry and clumsy ornamentation when looked closely into. A lofty and banked road, planted with fine sycamore figs, leads from Hamra to Ciut, and another embanked road leads from Ciut to the mountain of tombs. Of the ancient Egyptian city, no vestige remains, the modern town being built upon the mounds of the earlier settlement, but the city of the dead, so much of it, at least as was excavated in the living rock, survives, as at Memphis, to commemorate the departed splendor of the place. We took donkeys next day to the edge of the desert, and went up to the sepulchres on foot. The mountain, which looked a delicate salmon-pink when seen from afar, now showed bleached and arid and streaked with ochreous yellow. Layer above layer, in beds of strongly marked stratification, it towered overhead, tier above tier, the tombs yawned, open mouth along the face of the precipice. I picked up a fragment of the rock, and found it light, porous, and full of little cells like pumice. The slopes were strewn with such stones, as well as with fragments of mummy, shreds of mummy-cloth, and human bones, all whitening and withering in the sun. The first tomb we came to was the so-called Stable Antare, a magnificent but cruelly mutilated excavation consisting of a grand entrance, a vaulted corridor, a great hall, two side chambers, and a sanctuary. The ceiling of the corridor, now smoke-blackened and defaced, has been richly decorated with intricate patterns in light green, white, and buff upon a ground of dark bluish-green stucco. The wall to the right on entering is covered with a long hieroglyphic inscription. In the sanctuary, vague traces of seated figures, male and female, with lotus blossoms in their hands, are dimly visible. Two colossal warriors incised in outline upon the leveled rock, the one very perfect, the other hacked, almost out of recognition, stand on each side of the huge portal. A circular hole in the threshold marks the spot where the great door once worked upon its pivot, and a deep pit, now partially filled in with rubbish, leads from the center of the hall to some long, rifled vault deep down in the heart of the mountain. Willful destruction has been at work on every side. The wall sculptures are chipped into face. The massive pillars that once supported the super-incumbent rock have been carried away. The interior is heaped high with debris. Enough is left, however, to attest the antique statelyness of the tomb, and the hieroglyphic inscription remains almost intact until its age in history. This inscription erroneously entered in Murray's guide as uncopied, but interpreted by Brugge, who published extracts from it as far back as 1862, shows the excavation to have been made for one Hepuchepha, or Haptepha, no-mark of the Lycopolite gnome, and chief priest of the jackal god of Siud. It is also famous among scientific students for certain passages which contain important information regarding the intercalay days of the Egyptian calendar. We observed that the full-length figures on the jams of the doorway appeared to have been incised, filled in with stucco, and then colored. The stucco had, for the most part, fallen out, though enough remained to show the style of the work. From this tomb to the next we crept by way of a passage, tunneled in the mountain and emerged into a spacious, quadrangular grotto, even more dilapidated than the first. It had been originally supported by square pillars left standing in the substance of the rock. But like the pillars in the tomb of Hepuchepha, they had been hewn away in the middle and looked like stalactite columns in the process of formation. For the rest, two half-filled pits, a broken sarcophagus, and a few painted hieroglyphs upon a space of stuccoed wall were all that remained. One would have liked to see the sepulchre, in which Ampere, the brilliant and eager disciple of Champollion, deciphered the ancient name of Siut. But since he does not specify the cartouche by which it could be identified, one might wander about the mountain for a week without being able to find it. Having first described the stable enter, he says, in another grotto I found twice over the name of the city written in hieroglyphic characters, Siut. This name forms part of an inscription which also contains an ancient royal cartouche, so proving that the present name of the city dates back to pharaonic times. Here then we trace a double process of preservation. This town, which in the ancient Egyptian was written Siut, became Lycopolis under the Greeks, continued to be called Lycopolis throughout the period of Roman rule in Egypt, reverted to its old historic name under the cops of the Middle Ages, who wrote it Siut, and survives in the Asiut of the Arab Fella. Where is this by any means a solitary instance? Chemists in the same way became Panopolis, reverted to the Coptic Kimmon, and to this day as Ekmim perpetuates the legend of its first foundation. As with these fragments of the old tongue, so with the race, subdued again and again by invading hordes, intermixed first centuries together with Phoenician, Persian, Greek, Roman, and Arab blood, it fuses these heterogeneous elements in one common mold, reverts persistently to the early type, and remains Egyptian to the last. So strange is the tyranny of natural forces. The sun and soil of Egypt demand one special breed of men and will tolerate no other. Foreign residents cannot rear children in the country. In the Isthmus of Suez, which is considered the healthiest part of Egypt, an alien population of 20,000 persons failed in the course of ten years to rear one infant born upon the soil. Children of an alien father and an Egyptian mother will die off in the same way in early infancy, unless brought up in simple native fashion. And it is affirmed of the descendants of mixed marriages that after the third generation the foreign blood seems to be eliminated, while the traits of the race are restored in their original purity. These are but a few instances of the startling conservatism of Egypt, a conservatism which interested me particularly, and of which I so frequently have occasion to return. Each gnome or province of ancient Egypt had its sacred animal, and Seute was called Lycopolis by the Greeks because the wolf, now almost extinct in the land, was there held in the same kind of reverence as the cat at Bubastus, the crocodile at Ombus, and the lion at Lyontopolis. Mummy wolves are, or used to be, found in the smaller tombs about the mountain, as well as mummy jackals, anubis, the jackal-headed god being the presiding deity of the district. A mummy jackal from this place, curiously wrapped in striped bandages, is to be seen in the first Egyptian room at the British Museum. But the view from the mountains above Seute is finer than its tombs and more ancient than its mummies. Even from within the great doorway of the second grotto it looks like a framed picture. For the foreground we have a dazzling slope of limestone debris. In the middle distance a wide plain clothed with the delicious tender green of very young corn. Farther away yet the cupolas and minarets of Seute rising from the midst of a belt of palm groves. Beyond those again the molten gold of the great river glittering away, coil after coil, into the far distance. And all along the horizon the everlasting boundary of the desert. Large pools of placid water left by the last inundation lie here and there, like lakes amid the green. A group of brown men are wading yonder with their nets. A funeral comes along the embanked road, the beer carried at a rapid pace on men's shoulders, and covered with a red shawl, the women taking up handfuls of dust and scattering it upon their heads as they walk. We can see the dust flying and hear their shrill wail born upon the breathless air. The cemetery towards which they are going lies round to the left at the foot of the mountain, a wilderness of little white cupolas, with here and there a tree. Broad spaces of shade sleep under the spreading sycamores by the roadside, a hawk circles overhead, and Seute, bathed in the splendor of the morning sun, looks as fairy-like as ever. Lepceus is reported to have said that the view from this hillside was the finest in Egypt. But Egypt is a long country, and questions of precedence are delicate matters to deal with. It is, however, a very beautiful view, though most travelers who know the scenery about thieves and the approach to Aswan would hesitate, I should fancy, to give the preference to a landscape from which the nearer mountains are excluded by the position of the spectator. The tombs here, as in many other parts of Egypt, are said to have been largely appropriated by early Christian Ancorites during the reigns of the later Roman emperors, and to these recluses may perhaps be ascribed the legend that makes Lycopolis the abode of Joseph and Mary during the years of their sojourn in Egypt. It is, of course, but a legend and wholly improbable. If the holy family ever journeyed into Egypt at all, which certain biblical critics now hold to be doubtful, they probably rested from their wanderings at some town not very far from the eastern border, as Tannas, Pitham, or Bubastis. Seed wood at all events lie at least two hundred and fifty miles to the southward of any point to which they might reasonably be supposed to have penetrated. Still one would like to believe a story that laid the scene of our lord's childhood in the midst of this beautiful and glowing Egyptian pastoral, with what profound and touching interest it would invest the place, with what different eyes we should look down upon a landscape which must have been dear and familiar to him in all its details, and which, from the nature of the ground, must have remained almost unchanged from his day to ours. The mountain, with its tombs, the green corn flats, the nile and the desert, looked then as they looked now. It is only the Muslim minarets that are new. It is only the pylons and sanctuaries of the ancient worship that have passed away. End of Section 18 A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Section 19 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 7 Siut to Dendera, Part 1 We started from Siut with a couple of tons of new brown bread on board, which, being cut into slices and laid to dry in the sun, was speedily converted into rusts and stored away in two huge lockers on the upper deck. The sparrows and water-wagtails had a good time while the drying went on, but no one seemed to grudge the toll they levied. We often had a big wind now, though its seldom began to blow before ten or eleven a.m., and generally fell at sunset. Now and then, when it chanced to keep up, and the river was known to be free from shallows, we went on sailing through the night. But this seldom happened, and when it did happen it made sleep impossible, so that nothing but the certainty of doing a great many miles between bedtime and breakfast could induce us to put up with it. We had now been long enough afloat to find out that we had almost always one manned on the sick list, and were therefore habitually short of a hand for the navigation of the boat. There never were such fellows for knocking themselves to pieces as our sailors. They were always bruising their feet, wounding their hands, getting sun-strokes and wit-lows and sprains, and disabling themselves in some way. Well with her little medicine-chest and her roll of lint and bandages, soon had a small but steady practice, and might have been seen about the lower deck most mornings after breakfast, repairing those damaged alies and hasans. It was well for them that we carried an inexperienced surgeon, for they were entirely helpless and despondent when hurt, and ignorant of the commonest remedies. Nor is this helplessness confined to natives of the sailor and fellow-class. The provincial proprietors and officials are, to the full as ignorant, not only of the uses of such simple things as poultices or wet compresses, but of the most elementary laws of health. Doctors there are none south of Cairo, and such is the general mistrust of state medicine, that when, as in the case of any widely spread epidemic, a medical officer is sent up the river by order of the government, half the people are said to conceal their sick, while the other half reject the remedies prescribed for them. Their trust in the skill of the passing European is, on the other hand, unbounded. Appeals for advice and medicine were constantly being made to us by both rich and poor, and there was something very pathetic in the simple faith with which they accepted any little help we were able to give them. Meanwhile, L's medical reputation, being confirmed by a few simple cures, rose high among the crew. They called her the Hakim sit, the doctor-lady, obeyed her directions and swallowed her medicines as reverently as if she were the college of surgeons personified, and showed their gratitude in all kinds of pretty childlike ways, singing her favorite Arab song as they ran beside her donkey, searching for sculptured fragments whenever there were ruins to be visited, and constantly bringing her little gifts of pebbles and wildflowers. To see you, the picturesqueness of the river is confined for the most part to the eastern bank. We have, almost always, a near range of mountains on the Arabian side, and a more distant chain on the Libyan horizon. Gebel-sheikh Aranya succeeds to Gebel Abu Fayda, and is followed in close succession by the cliffs of Gow, of Gebel-sheikh El Heridi, of Gebel Aseret, and Gebel Tuk, all alike rigid in strongly marked beds of level limestone strata, flat-topped and even, like lines of giant ramparts, and more or less pierced with orifices, which we know to be tombs, but which look like loopholes from a distance. Flying before the wind, with both sails set, we see the rapid panorama unfold itself day after day, mile after mile, hour after hour. Villages, palm groves, rock-cut supple-curs flip past and are left behind. Today we enter the region of the Dome Palm. Tomorrow we pass the map-drawn limit of the crocodile. The cliffs advance, recede, open away into desolate-looking valleys, and show faint traces of paths leading to excavated tombs on distant heights. The headland that looked shadowy in the distance a couple of hours ago is reached and passed. The cargo boat on which we have been gaining all the morning is outstripped and dwindling in the rear. Now we pass a bold bluff sheltering a shake's tomb and a solitary Dome Palm, now an ancient quarry from which the stone has been cut out in smooth masses, leaving great halls and corridors and stages in the mountain side. At Gow, the scene of an insurrection headed by a crazy dervish some ten years ago, we see, in place of a large and populous village, only a tract of fertile corn-ground, a few ruined huts, and a group of decapitated palms. We are now skirting Gebel, Shake, El Heridi, here bordered by a rich margin of cultivated flat, yonder leaving space for scarce a strip of roadway between the precipice and the river. Then comes Rania, a large village of square-mud towers, lofty and battle-minted, with string-courses of pots for the pigeons, and later on, Gerga, once the capital town of Middle Egypt, where we put in for half an hour to post and inquire for letters. Here the Nile is fast eating away the bank and carrying the town by storm. A ruined mosque with pointed arches, roofless cloisters, and a leaning column that must surely have come to the ground by this time, stands just above the landing-place. A hundred years ago it lay a quarter of a mile from the river. Ten years ago it was yet perfect. After a few more inundations it will be swept away. Till that time comes, however, it helps make Gerga one of the most picturesque towns in Egypt. At Farshoot we see the sugarworks in active operation. Smoke pouring from the tall chimneys, steam issuing from the traps in the basement, cargo boats unlating fresh sugarcane against the bank, heavily burdened Arabs transporting it to the factory, bullock trucks laden with cane leafing for firing. A little higher up, at Sahil Bajura on the opposite side of the river, we find the bank strewn for a full quarter of a mile with sugarcane en masse. Hundreds of camels are either arriving laden with it or going back for more. Dozens of cargo boats are drawn up to receive it. Swarms of brown fela heen are stacking it on board for unshipment again at Farshoot. The camels snort and growl, the men shout, the overseers, in blue-fringed robes and white turbines stalk to and fro and keep the work going. The mountains here recede so far as to be almost out of sight, and a plain rich in sugarcane and date palms widens out between them and the river. And now the banks are lovely with an unwanted wealth of verdure. The young corn close the plain like a carpet, while the yellow-tassled mimosa, the feathery tamarisk, the dome and the date palm, and the spreading sycamore fig border the towing path like garden trees beside a garden walk. Farther on still, when all this greenery is left behind and the banks have again become flat and bare, we see to our exceeding surprise what seems to be a very large, grizzled ape perched on the top of a dust heap on the Western bank. The creature is evidently quite tame and sits on his haunches in just that chilly, melancholy posture that the chimpanzee is wont to assume in his cage at the zoological gardens. Some six or eight Arabs, one of whom has dismounted from his camel for the purpose, are standing round and staring at him, much as the British public stands round and stares at the specimen in Regent's Park. Meanwhile a strange excitement breaks out among our crew. They crowd to the side. They shout. They gesticulate. The captain salams. The steersman waves his hand. Real eyes are turned towards the shore. Do you see Shake Salim? cries Ptolemy breathlessly, rushing up from below. There he is. Look at him. That is Shake Salim. And so we find out that it is not a monkey but a man, and not only a man but a saint. Holiest of the holy, dirtiest of the dirty, white-painted, white-bearded, withered, bent, and knotted up is the renowned Shake Salim. He who, naked and unwashed, has sat on that same spot every day through summer heat and winter cold for the last fifty years, never providing himself with food or water, never even lifting his hand to his mouth, depending on charity not only for his food but for his feeding. He is not nice to look at, even by this dim light and at this distance, but the sailors think him quite beautiful and call aloud to him for his blessing as we go by. It is not by our own will that we sail past, O father, they cry. Fane would be kiss thy hand, but the wind blows and the mare-cib boat goes and we have no power to stay. But Shake Salim neither lifts his hand nor shows any sign of hearing, and in a few minutes the mound on which he sits is left behind in the gloaming. At Howe, where the new town is partly built on the mounds of the old, Diospolis parva, we next morning saw the natives' transporting small boatloads of ancient brick rubbish to the opposite side of the river, for the purpose of maneuvering those fields from which the early dura crop had just been gathered in. Thus curiously enough the mud left by some inundation of two or three thousand years ago comes at last to the use from which it was then diverted, and is found to be more fertilizing than the new deposit. At Kezar el Said, a little farther on, we came to one of the well-known bad-bits, a place where the bed of the river is full of sunken rocks and sailing is impossible. Here the men were half the day punting the dahabiya over the dangerous part, while we grubbed among the mounds of what was once the ancient city of Chinobasian. These remains which cover a large, superficial area and consist entirely of crude brick foundations are very interesting and in good preservation. We traced the ground plans of several houses, followed the passages by which they were separated, and observed many small arches which seemed built on too small a scale for doors or windows, but for which it was difficult to account in any other way. Brambles and weeds were growing in these deserted enclosures while rubbish heaps excavated pits and piles of broken pottery divided the ruins and made the work of exploration difficult. We looked in vain for the dilapidated quay and sculptured blocks mentioned in Wilkinson's general view of Egypt, but if the foundation stones of the sugar factory close against the mooring place could speak, they would no doubt explain the mystery. We saw nothing, indeed, to show that Chinobasian had contained any stone structures whatever, save the broken shaft of one small granite column. The village of Kaser S. Said consists of a cluster of mud huts and a sugar factory, but the factory was idle that day and the village seemed half deserted. The view here is particularly fine. About a couple of miles to the southward the mountains in magnificent procession came down again at right angles to the river, and thence reach away in long ranges of precipitous headlands. The plain, terminating abruptly against the foot of this gigantic barrier opens back eastward to the remotest horizon, an undulating sea of glistening sand bordered by a chaotic middle distance of mounded ruins. Nearest of all a narrow foreground of cultivated soil, green with young crops and watered by frequent shedoofs, extends along the riverside to the foot of the mountain. A shake's tomb shaded by a single dome-palm is conspicuous on the bank. While far away, planted amid the solitary weeds, we see a large coptic convent with many cupolas, a cemetery full of Christian graves, and a little oasis of date palms indicating the presence of a spring. The chief interest of this scene, however, centers in the ruins, and these looked upon from a little distance, blackened, desolate, half buried, obscured every now and then, when the wind swept over them by swirling clouds of dust, reminded us of the villages we had seen not two years before, half overwhelmed and yet smoking in the midst of a lava torrent below Vesuvius. We had now the full moon again, making night more beautiful than day. Sitting on deck for hours after the sun had gone down, when the boat glided gently on with half-filled sail and the force of the wind was spent, we used to wonder if in all the world there was another climate in which the effect of moonlight was so magical. To say that every object far or near was visible as distinctly as by day, yet more tenderly, is to say nothing. It was not only form that was defined, it was not only light and shadow that were vivid, it was color that was present. Color neither deadened nor changed, but softened, glowing, spiritualized. The amber sheen of the sand island in the middle of the river, the sober green of the palm grove, the little lady's turquoise-colored hood were clear to the sight and relatively true in tone. The oranges showed through the bars of the crate like nuggets of pure gold. El's crimson shawl glowed with a warmer dye than it ever wore by day. The mountains were flushed as if in the light of sunset. Of all the natural phenomenon that we beheld in the course of the journey, I remember none that surprised us more than this. We could scarcely believe at first that it was not some effective afterglow or some miraculous aurora of the east. But the sun had nothing to do with that flush upon the mountains. The glow was in the stone and the moonlight but revealed the local color. For some days before they came in sight we had been eagerly looking for the Theban Hills, and now, after a night of rapid sailing, we woke one morning to find the sun rising on the wrong side of the boat, the favorable wind dead against us, and a picturesque chain of broken peaks upon our starboard brow. By these signs we knew that we must have come to the great bend in the river between Howe and Kenna, and that these new mountains, so much more varied in form than those of Middle Egypt, must be the mountains behind Dendera. They seemed to lie upon the eastern bank, but that was an illusion which the mat disproved, and which lasted only till the great corner was fairly turned. To turn that corner, however, in the teeth of wind and current, was no easy task and cost us two long days of hard tracking. End of Section 19 A Thousand Miles of the Nile, Section 20 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Thousand Miles of the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 7 See You to Dendera, Part 2 At a point about ten miles below Dendera, we saw some thousands of fellowheen at work amid clouds of sand upon the embankments of a new canal. They swarmed over the mounds like ants, and the continuous murmur of their voices came to us across the river, like the humming of innumerable bees. Others following the path along the bank were pouring towards the spot in an unbroken stream. The Nile must here be nearly half a mile in breadth, but the engineers in European dress and the overseers with long sticks in their hands were plainly distinguishable by the help of a glass. The tents in which these officials were camping out during the progress of the work gleamed white among the palms by the riverside. Such scenes must have been common enough in the old days when a conquering pharaoh, returning from Libya or the land of Kush, set his captives to raise a dike or excavate a lake or quarry a mountain. The Israelites building the massive walls of pythons and ramesses with bricks of their own making must have presented exactly such a spectacle. That we were witnessing a case of forced labor could not be doubted. Those thousands yonder had most certainly been drafted off in gangs from hundreds of distant villages, and were but little better off for the time being than the captives of the ancient empire. In all cases of forced labor, under the present regime, however, it seems that the laborer is paid, though very insufficiently, for his unwilling toil, and that his captivity only lasts so long as the work for which he has been pressed remains in progress. In some cases the term of service is limited to three or four months, at the end of which time the men are supposed to be returned in barges towed by government steam-tugs. It too often happens, nevertheless, that the poor souls are left to get back how they can, and thus many a husband and father either perishes by the way or is driven to take service in some village far from home. Meanwhile his wife and children, being scantily supported by the sheikh El-Beled, fall into a condition of semi-surfdom, and his little patch of ground, left untilled through seed-time and harvest, passes after the next inundation into the hands of a stranger. But there is another side to this question of forced labor. Water must be had in Egypt no matter at what cost. If the land is not sufficiently irrigated the crops fail and the nation starves. Now the frequent construction of canals has, from immemorial time, been reckoned among the first duties of an Egyptian ruler. But it is a duty which cannot be performed without the willing or unwilling cooperation of several thousand workmen. Those who are best acquainted with the character and temper of the fellow maintain the hopelessness of looking to him for voluntary labor of this description. Frugal patient, easily contented as he is, no promise of wages, however high, would tempt him from his native village. What to him are the needs of a district six or seven hundred miles away? His own shadoof is enough for his own patch, and so long as he can raise his three little crops a year, neither he nor his family will starve. How then are these necessary public works to be carried out, unless by means of the corvée? Mr. Abu has put an ingenious summary of this other side argument into the mouth of his ideal fellow. It is not the emperor, says Ahmed to the Frenchman, who causes the rain to descend upon your lands. It is the west wind, and the benefit thus conferred upon you exacts no penalty of manual labor. But in Egypt, where the rain from heaven falls scarcely three times in the year, it is the prince who supplies its place to us by distributing the waters of the Nile. This can only be done by the work of men's hands, and it is therefore to the interest of all that the hands of all should be at his disposal. We regard it, I think, as a special piece of good fortune, when we found ourselves becalmed the next day within three or four miles of Dendera. Abidos comes first in order according to the map, but then the temples lie seven or eight miles from the river, and as we happened, just there about to be making some ten miles an hour, we put off the excursion till our return. Here, however, the ruins lay comparatively near at hand, and in such a position that we could approach them from below and rejoin our Dahabiya a few miles higher up the river. So leaving Rai's Hassan to track against the current, we landed at the first convenient point, and finding neither donkeys nor guides at hand took an escort of three or four sailors and set off on foot. The way was long, the day was hot, and we had only the map to go by. Having climbed the steep bank and skirted an extensive palm grove, we found ourselves in a country without paths or roads of any kind. The soil squared off, as usual, like a gigantic chessboard, was traversed by hundreds of tiny water channels, between which we had to steer our course as best we could. Presently the last belt of palms was past, the plain green with young corn and level as a lake widened out to the front of the mountains, and the temple, islanded in that sea of rippling emerald, rose up before us upon its platform of blackened mounds. It was still full two miles away, but it looked enormous, showing from this distance as a massive, low-browed, sharply-defined mass of dead white masonry. The walls sloped in slightly towards the top, and the facade appeared to be supported on eight square piers with a large doorway in the center. With sculptured ornament or cornice or pictured legend enriched these walls, we were too far off to distinguish them. All looked strangely naked and solemn, more like a tomb than a temple. Nor was the surrounding scene less deathlike in its solitude. Not a tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green monotony of the plain. Behind the temple, but divided from it by a farther space of mounded ruins, those mountains, pinky aerial with sheenie sandrifts heaped in the hollows of their bare buttresses, and spaces of soft blue shadow in their misty chasms, where the range receded a long vista of glittering desert opened to the Libyan horizon. Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised causeway which apparently connected the mountains with some point down by the river, the details of the temple gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now see the curve and the undershadow of the cornice, and a small object in front of the façade which looked at first like a monolithic altar, resolved itself into a massive gateway of the kind known as a single pylon. Nearer still among some low, outlying mounds we came upon fragments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half buried in rank grass, upon a series of stagnant, neater tanks and deserted workshops, upon the telegraph poles and wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the Sudan. Egypt is the land of Neater. It is found wherever a crude brick mound is disturbed or an antique stone structure demolished. The Nile mud is strongly impregnated with it, and in Nubia we used to find it lying in thick, talc-like flakes upon the surface of rocks far above the present level of the inundation. These tanks at Dendera had been sunk, we were told, when the great temple was excavated by Abbas Pasha more than twenty years ago. The Neater then found was utilized out of hand, washed and crystallized in the tanks, and converted into gunpowder in the adjacent workshops. The telegraph wires are more recent intruders and the work of the Kediv, but one long to put them out of sight, to pull down the gunpowder sheds and to fill up the tanks with debris. For what are the arts of modern warfare or the wonders of modern science to do with Hathor, the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades, the Nurse of Horus, the Egyptian Aphrodite, to whom yonder mountain of wrought stone and all these wastes were sacred? We were by this time near enough to see that the square piers of the façade were neither square nor piers, but huge round columns with human-headed capitals, and that the walls, instead of being plain and tomb-like, were covered with an infinite multitude of sculptured figures. The pylon, rich with inscriptions and ba reliefs, but disfigured by myriads of tiny wasps' nests, like clustered mud-bubbles, now towered high above our heads, and led to a walled avenue cut direct through the mounds and sloping downwards to the main entrance of the temple. Not, however, till we stood immediately under those ponderous columns, looking down upon the paved floor below and up to the huge cornice that projected overhead like the crest of an impending wave, did we realize the immense proportions of the building? Lofty as it looked from a distance, we now found that it was only the interior that had been excavated, and that not more than two-thirds of its actual height were visible above the mounds. The level of the avenue was, indeed, at its lowest part, full twenty feet above that of the first great hall, and we had still a deep, temporary staircase to go down before reaching the original pavement. The effect of the portico as one stands at the top of the staircase is one of overwhelming majesty. Its breadth, its height, the massiveness of its parts exceeding grandeur all that one has been anticipating throughout the long two miles of approach. The immense girth of the columns, the huge screens which connect them, the ponderous cornice jutting overhead, confuse the imagination and, in the absence of given measurements, appear perhaps even more enormous than they are. Looking up to the architrave, we see a kind of Egyptian panathenaic procession of carven priests and warriors, some with standards and some with musical instruments. The winged globe, depicted upon a gigantic scale in the curve of the cornice, seems to hover above the central doorway. Hieroglyphs, emblems, strange forms of kings and gods cover every foot of wallspace, frieze, and pillar. Nor does this wealth of surface sculpture tend in any way to diminish the general effect of size. It would seem on the contrary as if complex decorations were in this instance the natural complement to the simplicity of form. Every group, every inscription appears to be necessary and in its place, an essential part of the building it helps to adorn. Most of these details are as perfect as on the day when the last workman went his way, and the architect saw his design completed. Both of them has neither marred the surface of the stone nor blunted the work of the chisel. Such injury as they have sustained is from the hand of man, and in no country has the hand of man achieved more and destroyed more than in Egypt. The Persians overthrew the masterpieces of the pharaohs. The cops mutilated the temples of the Ptolemies and Caesars. The Arabs stripped the pyramids and carried Memphis away piecemeal. Here at Dendera we have an example of Greco-Egyptian work and early Christian fanaticism. Begun by Ptolemy XI, and bearing upon its latest ovals the name and style of Nero, the present building was still comparatively new when, in A.D. 379, the ancient religion was abolished by the edict of Theodosius. It was then the most gorgeous, as well as the most recent, of all those larger temples built during the prosperous foreign rule of the last seven hundred years. It stood surrounded by groves of palm and acacia, within the precincts of a vast enclosure, the walls of which one thousand feet in length, thirty-five feet high and fifteen feet thick, are still traceable. A drumos, now buried under twenty feet of debris, led from the pylon to the portico. The pylon is there still, a partial ruin, but the temple, with its roof, its staircases, and its secret treasure-crips, is in all essential respects as perfect as on the day when its splendor was given over to the spoilers. One can easily imagine how those spoilers sacked and ravaged all before them, how they desecrated the sacred places and cast down the statues of the goddess, and divided the treasures of the sanctuary. They did not, it is true, commit such wholesale destruction as the Persian invaders of nine hundred years before, but they were merciless, iconoclasts, and hacked away the face of every figure within easy reach, both inside and outside the building. Among those which escaped, however, is the famous external bar relief of Cleopatra on the back of the temple. This curious sculpture is now banked up with rubbish for its better preservation, and can no longer be seen by travelers. It was, however, admirably photographed some years ago by Sr. Beati, which photograph is faithfully reproduced in the annexed engraving. Cleopatra is here represented with a headdress combining the attributes of three goddesses, namely the vulture of Mount, the head of which is modeled in a masterly way, the hornet disc of Hathor, and the throne of Isis. The falling mass below the headdress is intended to represent hair dressed according to the Egyptian fashion, in an infinite number of small plates, each finished off with an ornamental tag. The women of Egypt and Nubia wear their hair so to this day, and unplate it, I am sorry to say, not oftener than once in every eight or ten weeks. The Nubian girls fasten each separate tail with a lump of Nile mud doved over with yellow ochre, but Queen Cleopatra's silk and tresses were probably tipped with gilded wax or gum. It is difficult to know where decorative sculpture ends and portraiture begins in a work of this epic. We cannot even be certain that a portrait was intended, though the introduction of the royal oval in which the name of Cleopatra is spelt with its vowel sounds in full would seem to point that way. If it is a portrait, then large allowance must be made for conventional treatment. The fleshiness of the features and the intolerable simper are common to every head of the Ptolemaic period. The ear, too, is pattern work, and the drawing of the figure is ludicrous. Manorism apart, however, the face wants for neither individuality nor beauty. Cover the mouth, and you have an almost faultless profile. The chin and throat are also quite lovely, while the whole face, suggestive of cruelty, subtlety, and voluptuousness, carries with it an indefinable impression not only of portraiture, but of lightness. It is not without something like a shock that one first sees the unsightly havoc wrought upon the hathor-headed columns of the façade at Dendera. The massive folds of headgear are there. The ears, erect and pointed like those of a heifer, are there. But of the benign yet face of the goddess not a feature remains. Ampere, describing these columns in one of his earliest letters from Egypt, speaks of them as being still brilliant with colors that time had no power to a face. Time, however, must have been unusually busy during the thirty years that have gone by since then. For though we presently found several instances of painted baw-reliefs in the small inner chambers, I do not remember to have served any remains of color save here and there a faint trace of yellow ochre on the external decorations. End of Section 20 A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Section 21 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 7 Siut to Dendera, Part 3 Without, all was sunshine and splendor, within, all was silence and mystery. A heavy, death-like smell as of long, imprisoned gases met us on the threshold. By the half-light that strayed in through the portico, we could see vague outlines of a forest of giant columns rising out of the gloom below and vanishing into the gloom above. Beyond these again appeared shadowy vistas of successive halls leading away into depths of impenetrable darkness. We required no great courage to go down those stairs and explore those depths with a party of fellow travelers, but it would have been a gruesome place to venture into alone. Seen from within, the portico shows as a vast hall, fifty feet in height and supported on twenty-four hathore-headed columns. Six of these, being engaged in the screen, form part of the façade, and are the same upon which we have been looking from without. By degrees, as our eyes become used to the twilight, we see here and there a capital which still preserves the vague lightness of a gigantic female face, while dimly visible on every wall, pillar, and doorway, a multitude of fantastic forms, hawk-headed, ibis-headed, cow-headed, metered, plumbed, holding aloft strange emblems, seated on thrones, performing mysterious rites, seem to emerge from their places, like things of life. Looking up to the ceiling, now smoke-blackened and defaced, we discover elaborate paintings of scarabye, winged globes, and zodiacal emblems divided by borders of intricate Greek patterns, the prevailing colors of which are verite and chocolate, bands of hieroglyphic inscription, of royal ovals, of hathore heads, of metered hawks, of lion-headed chimeras, of divinities and kings in barrelief, cover the shafts of the great columns from top to bottom, and even here every accessible face, however small, has been laboriously mutilated. Bewildered at first sight of these profuse and mysterious decorations, we wander round and around, going on from the first hall to the second, from the second to the third, and plunging into deeper darkness at every step. We have been reading about these gods and emblems for weeks past. We have studied the plan of the temple beforehand. Yet now that we are actually here, our book-knowledge goes for nothing, and we feel as hopelessly ignorant as if we had been suddenly landed in a new world. Not till we have got over this first feeling of confusion, not till, resting awhile on the base of one of the columns, we again open out the plan of the building, do we begin to realize the purport of the sculptures by which we are surrounded. The ceremonial of Egyptian worship was essentially processional. Herein we have the central idea of every temple, and the key to its construction. It was bound to contain store chambers in which were kept vestments, instruments, divine emblems, and the like, laboratories for the preparation of profumes and ungeants, treasures for the safe custody of holy vessels and precious offerings, chambers for the reception and purification of tribute in kind, halls for the assembling and marshaling of priests and functionaries, and for processional purposes, corridors, staircases, courtyards, cloisters, and vast enclosures planted with avenues of trees and surrounded by walls which hedged in with inviolable secrecy the solemn rites of the priesthood. In this plan it will be seen there is no provision made for anything in the form of public worship, but then an Egyptian temple was not a place for public worship. It was a treasure house, a sacristy, a royal oratory, a place of preparation of consecration, of sacerdotal privacy. There in costly shrines dwelt the divine images. Where they were robed and unrobed, perfumed with incense visited and worshipped by the king. On certain great days of the calendar, as on the occasion of the festival of the new year, or the panagerics of the local gods, these images were brought out, paraded along the corridors of the temple, carried round the roof, and borne with waving of banners and chanting of hymns and burning of incense through the sacred groves of the enclosure. Finally none were admitted to these ceremonies, save persons of royal or priestly birth. To the rest of the community all that took place within those massy walls was enveloped in mystery. It may be questioned, indeed, whether the great mass of people had any kind of personal religion. They may not have been rigidly excluded from the temple precincts, but they seem to have been allowed no participation in the worship of the gods. If now and then on high festival days they beheld the sacred bark of the deity carried in procession round the Temenos, or caught a glimpse of moving figures and glittering incense in the pillard dusk of the hippostyle hall, it was all they ever beheld of the solemn services of their church. The temple of Dendurah consists of a portico, a hall of entrance, a hall of assembly, a third hall which may be called the hall of the sacred boats, one small ground floor chapel, and upwards of twenty side chambers of various sizes, most of which are totally dark. Each one of these halls and chambers bears the sculptured record of its use. Hundreds of tableaus in Bowerly, thousands of elaborate hieroglyphic inscriptions cover every foot of available space on wall and ceiling and soffit, on doorway and column, and on the lining slabs of passages and staircases. These precious texts contain amid much that is mystical and tedious an extraordinary wealth of indirect history. Here we find programs of ceremonial observances, numberless legends of the gods, chronologies of kings with their various titles, registers of weights and measures, catalogs of offerings, recipes for the preparation of oils and essences, records of repairs and restorations done to the temple, geographical lists of cities and provinces, inventories of treasure and the like. The hall of assembly contains a calendar of festivals, and sets forth with studied precision the rights to be performed on each recurring anniversary. On the ceiling of the portico we find an astronomical zodiac. On the walls of a small temple on the rude, the whole history of the resurrection of Osiris, together with the order of prayer for the twelve hours of the night, and a calendar of the festivals of Osiris in all the principal cities of Upper and Lower Egypt. Seventy years ago these inscriptions were the puzzle and despair of the learned, but since modern science has plucked out the heart of its mystery, the whole temple lies before us an open volume filled to overflowing with strange and quaint and heterogeneous matter, a talmud in sculptured stone. Given such help as Mariette's Handbook affords, one can trace out most of these curious things and identify the uses of every hall and chamber throughout the building. The king in the double character of Pharaoh and High Priest is the hero of every sculptured scene, wearing sometimes the truncated crown of Lower Egypt, sometimes the helmet crown of Upper Egypt, and sometimes the shent, which is a combination of both, he figures in every tableau and heads every procession. Beginning with the sculptures of the portico we see him arrive preceded by his five royal standards. He wears his long robe, his sandals are on his feet, he carries his staff in his hand. Two goddesses receive him at the door and conduct him into the presence of Thoth, the Ibis-headed and Horus, the Hock-headed, who pour upon him a double stream of the waters of life. Thus purified he is crowned by the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, and by them consigned to the local deities of Thebes and Heliopolis, who usher him into the supreme presence of Hathor. He then presents various offerings and recites certain prayers, whereupon the goddess promises him length of days, everlasting renown, and other good things. We next see him, always with the same smile and always in the same attitude, doing homage to Osiris, to Horus, and other divinities. He presents them with flowers, wine, bread, incense, while they in return promise him life, joy, abundant harvests, victory, and the love of his people. These pretty speeches, chef d'oeuvre of diplomatic style and models of elegant flattery, are repeated over and over again in scores of hieroglyphic groups. Mariette, however, sees in them something more than the language of the court grafted upon the language of the hierarchy. He detects the language of the schools, and discovers in the utterances here ascribed to the king and the gods a reflection of that contemporary worship, of the beautiful, the good, and the true, which characterized the teaching of the Alexandrian museum. Passing on from the portico to the hall of assembly, we enter a region of still dimmer twilight, beyond which all is dark. In the side chambers, where the heat is intense and the atmosphere stifling, we can see only by the help of lighted candles. These rooms are about twenty feet in length, separate like prison cells, and perfectly dark. The sculptures which cover the walls are, however, as numerous as those in the outer halls, and indicate in each instance the purpose for which the room was designed. Thus in the laboratories we find ba reliefs of flasks and vases, and figures carrying perfume bottles of the familiar arribalos form, in the tribute chambers offerings of lotus lilies, wheat sheaves, maize, grapes, and pomegranates, in the oratories of Isis, Amun, and Sekhet, representations of these divinities enthroned and receiving the homage of the king, while in the treasury both king and queen appear laden with precious gifts of caskets, necklaces, pectoral ornaments, cystroms, and the like. It would seem that the image-breakers had no time to spare for these dark cells, for here the faces and figures are unmutilated, and in some places even the original coloring remains in excellent preservation. The complexion of the goddesses, for instance, is painted of a light buff. The king's skin is dark red. That of Amun is blue. Isis wears a rich robe of the well-known Indian pine pattern. Sekhet figures in a many-colored garment curiously dipered. Amun is clad in red and green chain armor. The skirts of the goddesses are inconceivably scant, but they are rich in jewelry, and their headdresses, necklaces, and bracelets are full of minute and interesting detail. In one of the four oratories dedicated to Sekhet, the king is depicted in the act of offering a pectoral ornament of so rich and elegant a design that, had there been time and daylight, the rider would feign have copied it. In the center of the room at the extreme end of the temple, exactly opposite the main entrance, lies the oratory of Hathor. This dark chamber into which no ray of daylight has ever penetrated contains the sacred niche, the Holy of Holies, in which was kept the great golden system of the goddess. The king alone was privileged to take out that mysterious emblem. Having done so, he enclosed it in a costly shrine, covered it with a thick veil, and placed it in one of the sacred boats of which we find elaborate representations, sculptured on the walls of the hall, in which they were kept. These boats, which were constructed of cedar wood, gold, and silver, when tended to be hoisted on wrought poles, and so carried in procession on the shoulders of the priests. The niche is still there, a mere hole in the wall, some three feet square and about eight feet from the ground. Thus candle in hand we make the circuit of these outer chambers. In each doorway, besides the place cut out for the bolt, we find a circular hole drilled above an equadrant-shaped hollow below, where once upon a time the pivot of the door turned in its socket. The paved floors torn up by treasure-seekers are full of treacherous holes and blocks of broken stone. The ceilings are very lofty. In the corridors a dim twilight rains, but all is pitch dark beyond these gloomy thresholds. Hurrying along by the light of a few flaring candles, one cannot but feel oppressed by the strangeness and awfulness of the place. We speak with bated breath, and even our chattering Arabs for once are silent. The very air tastes as if it had been imprisoned here for centuries. Finally we take the staircase on the northern side of the temple in order to go up to the roof. Nothing that we have yet seen surprises in Delisa so much, I think, as this staircase. We had hitherto been tracing in their order all the preparations for a great religious ceremony. We have seen the king enter the temple, undergo the symbolical purification, receive the twofold crown, and say his prayers to each divinity in turn. We have followed him into the laboratories, the oratories, and the holy of holies. All that he has yet done, however, is preliminary. The procession is yet to come, and here we have it. Here, sculptured on the walls of this dark staircase, the crowning ceremony of Egyptian worship is brought before our eyes in all its details. Here, one by one, we have the standard bearers, the hero with the offerings, the priests, the whole long wonderful procession with the king marching at its head. Fresh and uninjured as if they had but just left the hand of the sculptor, these figures, each in his habit as he lived, each with his foot upon the step, mount with us as we mount and go beside us all the way. Their attitudes are so natural, their forms so roundly cut, that one could almost fancy them in motion as the lights flicker by. Surely there must be some one weird night in the year when they step out from their places and take up the next verse of their chanted hymn, and to the sound of instruments long mute and songs long silent, pace the moonlit roof in ghastly order. The sun is already down and the crimson light has faded when at length we emerge upon that vast terrace. The roofing stones are gigantic, striding to and fro over some of the biggest. Our idle man finds several that measure seven paces in length by four in breadth. In yonder distant corner, like a little stone lodge in a vast courtyard, stands a small temple supported on hathor-headed columns, while at the eastern end forming a second and loftier stage rises the roof of the portico. Meanwhile the afterglow is fading, the mountains are yet clothed in an atmosphere of tender half-light, but mysterious shadows are fast creeping over the plain, and the mounds of the ancient city lie at our feet, confused and tumbled, like the waves of a dark sea. How high it is here, how lonely, how silent. Hark that thin plaintive cry, it is the wail of a night wandering jackal. See how dark it is yonder in the direction of the river. Quick, quick, we have lingered too long, we must be gone at once, for we are already benighted. We ought to have gone down by way of the opposite staircase, which is lined with sculptures of the descending procession, and out through the temple, but there is no time to do anything but scramble down by a breach in the wall, at a point where the mounds yet lie heaped against the south side of the building. And now the dusk steals on so rapidly that before we reach the bottom we can hardly see where to tread. The huge sidewall of the porticoes seems to tower above us to the very heavens. We catch a glimpse of two colossal figures, one lion-headed and the other headless, sitting outside with their backs to the temple. Then, making with all speed for the open plain, we clamor over scattered blocks and among shapeless mounds. Presently night overtakes us. The mountains disappear, the temple is blotted out, and we have only the faint starlight to guide us. We stumble on, however, keeping all close together, firing a gun every now and then in the hope of being heard by those in the boats, and as thoroughly and undeniably lost as the babes in the wood. At last, just as some are beginning to knock up and all to despair, Ptolemy fires his last cartridge. An answering shot replies from nearby, a wandering light appears in the distance, and presently a whole bevy of dancing lanterns and friendly brown faces comes gleaming out from among a plantation of sugar canes to welcome and guide us home. Dear, sturdy, faithful little Rai's Hasan, honest Khalifa, laughing Salome, gentle Mehmet Ali, and Musa, black but comely, they were all there. With a shaking of hands there was, what a gleaming of white teeth, what a shower of mutually unintelligible congratulations. For my own part I may say with truth that I was never much more rejoiced at a meeting in my life. END OF SECTION XXI. A THOUSAND MILE'S UP TO NILE, SECTION XXII. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A THOUSAND MILE'S UP TO NILE by Amelia B. Edwards. CHAPTER VIII. THIEVES AND CARNAC PART I. Coming on deck the third morning after leaving Dendera, we found the Dahabiya decorated with palm branches, our sailors in their holiday turbines, and Rai's Hasan and Grand Tenu, that is to say in shoes and stockings, which he only wore on very great occasions. Niharik Said, Good Morning, Luxor, said he, all in one breath. It was a hot, hazy morning, with dim ghosts of mountains glowing through the midst and a warm wind blowing. We ran to the side, looked out eagerly, but could see nothing. Still the captain smiled anodded, and the sailors ran hither and thither, sweeping and garnishing. And agendi, to whom his worst enemy could not have imputed the charge of bashfulness, said, Luxor, Kharuph, all right, every time he came near us. We had read and dreamed so much about thieves, and it had always seemed so far away, that but for this delicate illusion to the promised sheep, we could hardly have believed we were really drawing nigh unto those famous shores. About ten, however, the mist was lifted away like a curtain, and we saw to the left a rich plain studded with palm groves, to the right a broad margin of cultivated lands bounded by a bold range of limestone mountains, and on the farthest horizon another range, all gray and shadowy. Karnak, Gurnah, Luxor, says Rais Hasan triumphantly, pointing in every direction at once. Many tries to show us Medinit Habu, and the Memnonium. The painter vows he can see the heads of the sitting Colossi and the entrance to the valley of the tombs of the kings. We meanwhile stare bewildered, incredulous, seeing none of these things, finding it difficult, indeed, to believe that anyone else sees them. The river widens away before us, the flats are green on either side, the mountains are pierced with terraces of rock-cut tombs, while far away inland, apparently on the verge of the desert, we see here a clump of sycamores, yonder, a dark hillock, midway between both a confused heap of something that may be either be fallen rock or fallen masonry, but nothing that looks like a temple, nothing to indicate that we are already within recognizable distance of the grandest ruins in the world. Finally however, as the boat goes on, a massive, windowless structure which looks, heaven preserve us, just like a brand new fort or prison, towers up above the palm groves to the left. This we are told is one of the propylons of Karnak, while a few whitewashed huts and a little crowd of masts, now coming into sight a mile or two higher up, mark the position of Luxor. One up capers agendi with his never-failing Luxor, Karuf, all right, to fetch down the tar and Darbuka. The captain claps his hands, a circle is formed on the lower deck. The men, all smiles, strike up their liveliest chorus, and so, with barbaric music and well-filled sails, and flags flying and green boughs waving overhead, we make our triumphal entry into Luxor. The top of another pylon, the slender peak of an obelisk, a colonnade of giant pillars half buried in the soil, the white houses of the English, American, and Prussian consuls, each with its flagstaff and ensign, a steep slope of sandy shore, a background of mud walls and pigeon towers, a foreground of native boats and gaily painted ahabiyas lying at anchor, such as we sweet by is our first panoramic view of this famous village, a group of turban officials sitting in the shade of an arched doorway rise and salute us as we pass. The assembled ahabiyas dozing with folded sails, like sea birds asleep, are roused to spasmodic activity. Flags are lowered, guns are fired, all Luxor is startled from its midday siesta. Then before the smoke has had time to clear off, up comes the bagstones in gallant form, whereupon the ahabiyas glaze away again as before. And now there is a rush of donkeys and donkey boys, beggars, guides, and antiquity-dealers to the shore. The children screaming for Bakshish, the dealers exhibiting strings of imitation scarabs, the donkey boys vociferating the names and praises of their beasts, all alike regarding us as their lawful prey. Hi, lady, Yankee-doodle donkey, try Yankee-doodle, cries one. Far away Moses, yells another, good donkey, fast donkey, best donkey in Luxor. This Prince of Wales's donkey, shouts a third, hauling forward a decrepit, little, weak-need, moth-eaten-looking animal about as good to ride on as a towel-horse. First-rate donkey, splendid donkey, God save the queen, hurrah! But neither donkeys nor scarabs are of any importance in our eyes just now, compared with the letters we hope to find awaiting us on shore. No sooner, therefore, are the boats made vast than we are all off, some to the British consulate and some to the post-restaurant, from both of which we return rich and happy. Meanwhile, we proposed to spend only twenty-four hours in Luxor. We were to ride round Karnak this first afternoon, to cross to Medenet Habu and the Ramiseum tomorrow morning, and to sail again as soon after midday as possible. We hoped thus to get a general idea of the topography of Thebes and to carry away a superficial impression of the architectural style of the Pharaohs. It would be but a glimpse, yet that glimpse was essential. For Thebes represents the great central period of Egyptian art. The earlier styles lead up to that point, the latter depart from it, and neither the earlier nor the later are intelligible without it. At the same time, however, travelers bound for the second cataract do well to put off everything like a detailed study of Thebes till the time of coming back. For the present, a rapid survey of the three principal groups of ruins is enough. It supplies the necessary link. It helps one to a right understanding of Edfu, a filet of Abu Simbel. In a word it enables one to put things in their right places, and this, after all, is a mental process which every traveler must perform for himself. Thebes, I need scarcely say, was built like London on both sides of the river. Its original extent must have been very great, but its public buildings, its quays, its thousands of private dwellings are gone and have left few traces. The secular city, which was built of crude brick, is represented by a few insignificant mounds, while of the sacred edifices five large groups of limestone ruins, three on the western bank and two on the eastern, together with the remains of several small temples and a vast multitude of tombs, are all that remain in permanent evidence of its ancient splendor. Luxor is a modern Arab village occupying the site of one of the oldest of these five ruins. It stands on the eastern bank, close against the river, about two miles south of Karnak and nearly opposite the famous sitting colossi of the western plain. On the opposite bank lie Gurnah, the Ramiseum, and Medinit Habu. A glance at the map will do more than pages of explanation to show the relative position of these ruins. The temple of Gurnah, it will be seen, is almost vis-a-vis of Karnak. The Ramiseum faces about half way between Karnak and Luxor. Medinit Habu is placed farther to the south than any building on the eastern side of the river. One of these three western groups, going far and wide along the edge of the Libyan range, lies the great Theban Necropolis. While farther back still in the radiating valleys on the other side of the mountains are found the tombs of the kings. The distance between Karnak and Luxor is a little less than two miles, while from Medinit Habu to the temple of Gurnah may be roughly guessed at something under four. We have here, therefore, some indication of the extent, though not of the limits, of the ancient city. Luxor is a large village inhabited by a mixed population of cops and Arabs, and doing a smart trade in antiquities. The temple has here formed the nucleus of the village, the older part of which has grown up in and about the ruins. The grand entrance faces north, looking down towards Karnak. The twin towers of the great Propylon, dilapidated as they are, except of their cornices, encumbered with debris, are magnificent still. In front of them one on each side of the central gateway sit two helmeted colossi, battered and featureless and buried to the chin, like two of the proud in the doleful fifth circle. A few yards in front of these again stands a solitary obelisk, also half buried. The colossi are of black granite, the obelisk is of red, highly polished, and covered on all four sides with superb hieroglyphs in three vertical columns. These hieroglyphs are engraved with the precision of the finest gem. They are cut to a depth of about two inches in the outer columns and five inches in the central column of the inscription. The true height of this wonderful monolith is over seventy feet, between thirty and forty of which are hidden under the accumulated soil of many centuries. Its companion obelisk, already scaling away by imperceptible degrees under the sky influence of an alien climate, looks down with melancholy indifference upon the petty revolutions and counter revolutions of the Place de la Concorde. On a line with the two black colossi, but some fifty feet or so farther to the west, rises a third and somewhat smaller head of chert or limestone, the fellow to which is doubtless hidden among the huts that encroach half way across the face of the eastern tower. The whole outer surface of these towers is covered with elaborate sculptures of gods and men, horses and chariots, the pageantry of triumph and the carnage of war. The king in his chariot draws his terrible bow, or slays his enemies on foot, or sits enthroned receiving the homage of his court. All regiments armed with lance and shield march across the scene. The foe flies in disorder. The king, attended by his fan-bearers, returns in state, and the priests burn incense before him. This king is Rameses II, called Cessostris and Ocemandias by ancient writers, and best known to history as Rameses the Great. His actual names and titles as they stand upon the monuments are Raiusirma Saptinra Ramesirma Amin, that is to say, Ra, strong in truth, approved of Ra, son of Ra, beloved of Amin. The battle scenes here represented relate to that memorable campaign against the Kedah, which forms the subject of the famous third Salyur Papyrus, and is commemorated upon the walls of almost every temple built by this Monarch. Separated from his army and surrounded by the enemy, the king, attended only by his chariot-driver, is said to have six times charged the foe, to have hewn them down with his sword of might, to have trampled them like straw beneath his horse's feet, to have dispersed them single-handed like a god. Two thousand five hundred chariots were there, and he overthrew them, one hundred thousand warriors, and he scattered them. Those that he slew not with his hand he chased unto the water's edge, causing them to leap to destruction as leaps the crocodile. Such was the immortal feat of Ramesses, and such the chronicle written by the royal scribe Pentar. Setting aside the strain of Homeric exaggeration, which runs through this narrative, there can be no doubt that it records some brilliant deed of arms actually performed by the king within sight, though not within reach of his army, and the hieroglyphic text interspersed among these tableaux state that the events depicted took place on the fifth day of the month epiphy in the fifth year of his reign. By this we must understand the fifth year of his sole reign, which would be five years after the death of his father, said he the first, with whom he had, from an early age, been associated on the throne. He was a man in the prime of life at the time of this famous engagement, which was fought under the walls of Kedesh on the Orontes, and the bar-relief sculptures show him to have been accompanied by several of his sons, who, though evidently very young, are represented in their war-chariots fully armed and taking part in the battle. End of section 22 A thousand miles up the Nile, section 23 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 8 Thebes and Karnak, Part II The mutilated Colossi are portrait statues of the conqueror. The obelisk in the pompous style of Egyptian dedication proclaims that, the Lord of the world, guardian son of truth, approved of Ra, has built this edifice in honor of his father, Amen Ra, and has erected to him these two great obelisks of stone in face of the house of Ramesses in the city of Ammon. So stately was the approach made by Ramesses the Great to the temple founded about a hundred and fifty years before his time by Amenhotep III. He also built the courtyard upon which this pylon opened, joining it to the older part of the building in such wise that the original first court became now the second court, while next in order came the portico, the hall of assembly, and the sanctuary. By and by, when the long line of Ramesses had passed away, other and later kings put their hands to the work. The names of Shabbaka, Sabaco, of Ptolemy, Philopater, and of Alexander the Younger appear among the later inscriptions, while those of Amenhotep IV, Kuan Aten, Horamheb, and Sedi, the father of Ramesses the Great, are found in the earlier parts of the building. It was in this way that an Egyptian temple grew from age to age, owing a colonnade to this king and a pylon to that, till it came in time to represent the styles of many periods. Hence too that frequent irregularity of plan, which, unless it could be ascribed to the caprices of successive builders, would form so unaccountable a feature in Egyptian architecture. In the present instance the pylon and courtyard of Ramesses the Second are set at an angle of five degrees to the courtyard and sanctuary of Amenhotep III. This has evidently been done to bring the temple of Luxor into a line with the temple of Karnak, in order that the two might be connected by means of that stupendous avenue of Sphinxes, the scattered remains of which yet drew the course of the ancient roadway. As I have already said, these half-buried pylons, this solitary obelisk, those giant heads rising in ghastly resurrection before the gates of the temple, were magnificent still. But it was as the magnificence of a splendid prologue to a poem of which only garbled fragments remain. Beyond that entrance lay a smoky, filthy, intricate labyrinth of lanes and passages. Mud hovels, mud pigeon-towers, mud yards, and a mud mosque, clustered like wasps' nests in and about the ruins. Sculptured with royal titles supported the roofs of squalid cabins. Stately capitals peeped out from the midst of sheds in which buffaloes, camels, donkeys, dogs, and human beings were seen herding together in an unsavory fellowship. Cox-crew, hens cackled, pigeons cooed, turkeys gobbled, children swarmed, women were baking and gossiping, and all assorted routine of Arab life was going on amid winding alleys that masked the colonnades and to face the inscriptions of the pharaohs. To trace the plan of this part of the building was then impossible. All communication being cut off between the courts and the portico, we had to go round outside and through a door at the farther end of the temple in order to reach the sanctuary and the adjoining chambers. The Arab who kept the key provided an inch or two of candle, for it was very dark in there, the roof being still perfect, with a large, rambling, modern house built on top of it, so that if this part of the temple was ever partially lighted, as at Dendera and elsewhere, by small wedge-like openings in the roof, even those faint gleams were excluded. The sanctuary which was rebuilt in the reign of Alexander Aegis, some small side chambers and a large hall, which was perhaps the Hall of Assembly, were all that remained under cover of the original roving-stones. Some half-buried and broken columns on the side next to the river showed, however, that this end was formerly surrounded by a colonnade. The sanctuary, an oblong granite chamber with its own separate roof, stands enclosed in a larger hall, like a box within a box, and is covered inside and outside with bar reliefs. These sculptures, among which I observed a kneeling figure of the king, offering a kneeling image to Amenra, are executed in the mediocre style of the Ptolemies. That is to say, the forms are more natural, but less refined than those of the pharaonic period. The limbs are fleshy, the joints large, the features insignificant. Of actual portraiture one cannot detect a trace, while every face wears the same objectionable smirk which disfigures the Cleopatra of Dendera. In the large hall, which I have called the Hall of Assembly, one is carried back to the time of the founder. Between Amenhotep III and Alexander ages there lies a great gulf of twelve hundred years, and their styles are as widely separated as their reins. The merest novice could not possibly mistake the one for the other. Everything is, of course, more common than to find Egyptian and Greco-Egyptian works side by side in the same temple, but nowhere are the distinctive characteristics of each brought into stronger contrast than in these dark chambers of Luxor. In the sculptures that line the hall of Amenhotep we find the pure lines, the severe and slender forms, the characteristic heads of a period when the art, having as yet neither gained nor lost by foreign influences, was entirely Egyptian. The subjects relate chiefly to the infancy of the king, but it is difficult to see anything properly by the light of a candle tied to the end of a stick, and here where the bar relief is so low and the walls are so high, it is almost impossible to distinguish the details of the upper tableau. I could make out, however, that Amenhotep and their son Kansu, the three personages of the Theban Triad, are the presiding deities of these scenes, and that they are in some way identified with the fortunes of Tutmos the Fourth, his queen, and their son Amenhotep III. Amenhotep is born, apparently, under the especial protection of Mott, the Divine Mother, brought up with the youthful God Kansu and received by Amen as the brother and equal of his own divine son. I think it was in this hall that I observed a singular group representing Amen and Mott in an attitude symbolical, perhaps, of trothplight or marriage. They sit face to face, the goddess holding in her right hand the left hand of the god, while in her left hand she supports his right elbow. Their thrones, meanwhile, rest on the heads, and their feet are upheld on the hands of two female genie. It is significant that Ramesses III, and one of the ladies of his so-called harem, are depicted in the same attitude in one of the famous domestic subjects, sculptured on the upper stories of the pavilion at Medinet Habu. We saw this interesting temple much too cursorily, yet we gave more time to it than the majority of those who year after year anchor for days together close under its majestic columns. If the whole building could be transported bodily to some point between Memphis and Siut, where the river is bare of ruins, it would be enthusiastically visited. Here it is eclipsed by the wonders of Karnak and the Western Bank, and is undeservedly neglected. Those parts of the original building which yet remain are, indeed, peculiarly precious. For Amenhotep, or Amenov III, was one of the great builder-kings of Egypt, and we have here one of the few extant specimens of his architectural work. The Coptic quarter of Luxor lies north of the Great Pylon, and partly skirts the river. It is cleaner, wider, more airy than that of the Arabs. The Prussian consul is a copped, the polite postmaster is a copped, and in a modest lodging built half beside and half over the Coptic church lives the Coptic bishop. The postmaster, an ungainly youth in a European suit so many sizes too small that his arms and legs appeared to be sprouting out at the ends of his garments, was profuse in his offers of service. He undertook to forward letters to us at Aswan, Corasso, and Wadi-Halfa, where post offices had lately been established. And he kept his promise, I am bound to say, with perfect punctuality, always adding some queer little complimentary message on the outer wrapper, such as, I hope you well my compliments, or wishes you good news pleasant voyage. As a specimen of his literary style I copied the following notice, of which it was evident that he was justly proud. Notice On the commendation we have ordered the post stations in Lower Egypt from Aswet to Khartoum, belonging to the post Qedevi Egyptian in a good order. Now to pay for letters in Lower Egypt is as in Upper Egypt twice. Means that the letters which goes from here far than Aswet must pay for it two piastras per ten grams. Also that which goes far than Khartoum. The letters which goes between Aswet and Khartoum must pay only one piastra per ten grams. This and that is to buy stamps from the post and put it upon the letter. Also if somebody wishes to send letters insuranced must two piastras more for any letter. There is or duration in the post to receive the letters which goes to Europe, America, and Asia, as England, France, Italy, Germany, Syria, Constantinople, etc. Also to send newspapers, patterns, and other things. Luxor, 1st January, 1874. This young man begged for a little stationery and a penknife at parting. We had, of course, much pleasure in presenting him with such a modest testimonial. We afterwards learned that he levied the same little tribute on every Dahabiyah that came up the river. So I conclude that he must, by this time, have quite an interesting collection of small cutlery. From the point where the railroad ends the Egyptian and Nubian males are carried by runners stationed at distances of four miles all along the route. Each man runs his four miles and at the end thereof finds the next man ready to snatch up his bag and start off at full speed immediately. The next man transfers it in like manner to the next and so it goes by day and night without a break till it reaches the first railway station. Each runner is supposed to do his four miles in half an hour, and the male which goes out every morning from Luxor reaches Cairo in six days. Considering that Cairo was 450 miles away, that 268 miles of this distance had to be done on foot, and that the trains went only once a day, we thought this a very creditable speed. In the afternoon we took donkeys and rode out to Karnak. Our way lay through the bazaar, which was the poorest we had yet seen. It consisted of only a few open sheds, in one of which seated on a mud-built devan cross-legged and turbanless like a row of tumbler mandarins, we saw five of our sailors under the hands of the Luxor barber. He had just lathered all five heads, and was complacently surveying the effect of his work, much as an artistic cook might survey a dish of particularly successful meringues a la creme. The meringues looked very sheepish when we laughed and passed by. Next came the straggling suburb where the dancing girls most do congregate. These damsels in gaudy garments of emerald green, bright rows and flaming yellow were squatting outside their cabins or lounging unveiled about the thresholds of two or three dismal dens of cafes in the marketplace. They showed their teeth and laughed familiarly in our faces. Their eyebrows were painted to meet on the bridge of the nose, their eyes were blackened round with coal, their cheeks were extravagantly rouged, their hair was gummed and greased and festooned upon their foreheads, and plated all over in enumerable tails. Never before had we seen anything in female form so hideous. One of these hurries was black, and she looked quite beautiful in her blackness compared with the painting and plastering of her companions. We now left the village behind and rode out across a wide plain, barren and hillyky in some parts, overgrown in others with coarse alfagrass, and dotted here and there with clumps of palms. The nile lay low and out of sight, so that the valley seemed to stretch away uninterruptedly to the mountains on both sides. Now leaving to the left a shakes-tomb topped by a little cupola and shadowed by a group of tamarists, now following the bed of a dry water-course, now skirting shapeless mounds that indicated the sight of ruins unexplored, the road uneven but direct led straight to Karnak. At every rise in the ground we saw the huge propylons towering higher above the palms. Once, but for only a few moments, there came into sight a confused and widespread mass of ruins, as extensive, apparently, as the ruins of a large town. Then our way dipped into a sandy grove bordered by mud walls and plantations of dwarf palms. All at once this grove widened and became a stately avenue guarded by a double file of shattered sphinxes and led towards a lofty pylon standing up alone against the sky. Once beside this grand gateway, as if growing there on purpose rose a thicket of sycamores and palms, while beyond it were seen the twin pylons of a temple. The sphinxes were colossal and measured about ten feet in length. One or two were ram-headed. Of the rest some forty or fifty in number, all were headless. Some split asunder, some overturned, others so mutilated that they looked like torrent-worn boulders. This avenue once reached from Luxor to Carnac. Taking into account the distance, which is just two miles from temple to temple, and the short intervals at which the sphinxes are placed, there cannot originally have been fewer than five hundred of them. That is to say two hundred and fifty on each side of the road. Dismounting for a few minutes we went into the temple, glanced round the open courtyard with its collinative pillars, peeped hurriedly into some ruinous side chambers, and then rode on. Our books told us that we had seen the small temple of Ramesses III. It would have been called large anywhere but at Carnac.