for instance, rests on a nilometer; his arm, surmounted by a head, is sculptured on a stela, in shape resembling a

high-shouldered bottle, surmounted by one of the head-dresses peculiar to the god; his legs and feet lie in a pylon-shaped mausoleum. Upon another shrine stands the miter-shaped crown which he wears as judge of the lower world. Isis and Nephthys keep guard over each shrine. In a lower frieze we see the mummy of the god laid upon a bier, with the four so-called canopic jars[66] ranged underneath. A little farther on he lies in state, surrounded by

lotus buds on tall stems, figuratively of growth, or returning life.[67] Finally, he is depicted lying on a couch; his limbs reunited; his head, left hand, and left foot upraised, as in the act of returning to consciousness. Nephthys, in the guise of a winged genius, fans him with the breath of life. Isis, with outstretched arms, stands at his feet and seems to be calling him back to her embraces. The scene represents, in fact, that supreme moment when Isis pours forth her passionate invocations, and Osiris is resuscitated by virtue of the songs of the divine sisters.[68]

Ill-modeled and ill-cut as they are, there is a clownish naturalness about these little sculptures which lifts them above the conventional dead level of ordinary Ptolemaic work. The figures tell their tale intelligibly. Osiris seems really struggling to rise, and the action of Isis expresses clearly enough the intention of the artist. Although a few heads have been mutilated and the surface of the stone is somewhat degraded, the subjects are by no means in a bad state of preservation. In the accompanying sketches, nothing has been done to improve the defective drawing or repair the broken outlines of the originals. Osiris in one has lost his foot and in another his face; the hands of Isis are as shapeless as those of a bran doll; and the naïveté of the treatment verges throughout upon caricature. But the interest attaching to them is altogether apart from the way in which they are executed. And now, returning to the roof, it is pleasant to breathe the fresher air that comes with sunset—to see the island, in shape like an ancient Egyptian shield, lying mapped out beneath one’s feet. From here, we look back upon the way we have come, and forward to the way we are going. Northward lies the cataract—a network of islets with flashes of river between. Southward, the broad current comes on in one smooth, glassy sheet, unbroken by a single rapid. How eagerly we turn our eyes that way; for yonder lie Abou Simbel and all the mysterious lands beyond the cataracts! But we cannot see far, for the river curves away grandly to the right and vanishes behind a range of granite hills. A similar chain hems in the opposite bank; while high above the palm-groves fringing the edge of the shore stand two ruined convents on two rocky prominences, like a couple of castles on the Rhine. On the east bank opposite, a few mud houses and a group of superb carob trees mark the site of a village, the greater part of which lies hidden among palms. Behind this village opens a vast sand valley, like an arm of the sea from which the waters have retreated. The old channel along which we rode the other day went plowing that way straight across from Philæ. Last of all, forming the western side of this fourfold view, we have the island of Biggeh—rugged, mountainous, and divided from Philæ by so narrow a channel that every sound from the native village on the opposite steep is as audible as though it came from the court-yard at our feet. That village is built in and about the ruins of a tiny Ptolemaic temple, of which only a screen and doorway and part of a small propylon remain. We can see a woman pounding coffee on the threshold of one of the huts, and some children scrambling about the rocks in pursuit of a wandering turkey. Catching sight of us up here on the roof of the temple, they come whooping and scampering down to the water side and with shrill cries importune us for backshîsh. Unless the stream is wider than it looks one might almost pitch a piaster into their outstretched hands.

Mr. Hay, it is said, discovered a secret passage of solid masonry tunneled under the river from island to island. The entrance on this side was from a shaft in the Temple of Isis.[69] We are not told how far Mr. Hay was able to penetrate in the direction of Biggeh; but the passage would lead up, most probably, to the little temple opposite.

Perhaps the most entirely curious and unaccustomed features in all this scene are the mountains. They are like none that any of us have seen in our diverse wanderings. Other mountains are homogeneous and thrust themselves up from below in masses suggestive of primitive disruption and upheaval. These seem to lie upon the surface foundationless; rock loosely piled on rock, bowlder on bowlder; like stupendous cairns, the work of demigods and giants. Here and there, on shelf or summit, a huge rounded mass, many tons in weight, hangs poised capriciously. Most of these blocks, I am persuaded, would “log” if put to the test.

But for a specimen stone commend me to yonder amazing monolith down by the water’s edge opposite, near the carob trees and the ferry. Though but a single block of orange-red granite, it looks like three; and the Arabs, seeing it in some fancied resemblance to an arm-chair, call it Pharaoh’s throne. Rounded and polished by primeval floods and emblazoned with royal cartouches of extraordinary size, it seems to have attracted the attention of pilgrims in all ages. Kings, conquerors, priests, travelers, have covered it with records of victories, of religious festivals, of prayers, and offerings, and acts of adoration. Some of these are older by a thousand years and more than the temples on the island opposite.

Such, roughly summed up, are the fourfold surroundings of Philæ—the cataract, the river, the desert, the environing mountains. The Holy Island—beautiful, lifeless, a thing of the far past, with all its wealth of sculpture, painting, history, poetry, tradition—sleeps, or seems to sleep, in the midst.

It is one of the world’s famous landscapes, and it deserves its fame. Every sketcher sketches it; every traveler describes it. Yet it is just one of those places of which the objective and subjective features are so equally balanced that it bears putting neither into words nor colors. The sketcher must perforce leave out the atmosphere of association which informs his subject; and the writer’s description is at best no better than a catalogue raisonnée.

CHAPTER XIII.

PHILÆ TO KOROSKO.

Meanwhile, it is not only men and women whom we miss—men laboring by the river side; women with babies astride on their shoulders, or water-jars balanced on their heads—but birds, beasts, boats; everything that we have been used to see along the river. The buffaloes dozing at midday in the shallows, the camels stalking home in single file toward sunset, the water-fowl haunting the sand-banks, seem suddenly to have vanished. Even donkeys are now rare; and as for horses, I do not remember to have seen one during the seven weeks we spent in Nubia. All night, too, instead of the usual chorus of dogs barking furiously from village to village, we hear only the long-drawn wail of an occasional jackal. It is not wonderful, however, that animal life should be scarce in a district where the scant soil yields barely food enough for those who till it. To realize how very scant it is, one needs only to remember that about Derr, where it is at its widest, the annual deposit nowhere exceeds half a mile in breadth; while for the most part of the way between Philæ and Wady Halfeh—a distance of two hundred and ten miles—it averages from six to sixty yards.

Here, then, more than ever, one seems to see how entirely these lands which we call Egypt and Nubia are nothing but the banks of one solitary river in the midst of a world of desert. In Egypt, the valley is often so wide that one forgets the stony waste beyond the corn-lands. But in Nubia the desert is ever present. We cannot forget it, if we would. The barren mountains press upon our path, showering down avalanches of granite on the one side and torrents of yellow sand on the other. We know that those stones are always falling; that those sands are always drifting; that the river has hard work to hold its own; and that the desert is silently encroaching day by day.

These golden sand-streams are the newest and most beautiful features in the landscape. They pour down from the high level of the Libyan desert just as the snows of Switzerland pour down from the upper plateaux of the Alps. Through every ravine and gap they find a channel—here trickling in tiny rivulets; flowing yonder in broad torrents that widen to the river.

Becalmed a few miles above Philæ, we found ourselves at the foot of one of these largest drifts. The M. B.’s challenged us to climb the slope and see the sunset from the desert. It was about six o’clock, and the thermometer was standing at 80° in the coolest corner of the large saloon. We ventured to suggest that the top was a long way up; but the M. B.’s would take no refusal. So away we went; panting, breathless, bewailing our hard fate. L—— and the writer had done some difficult walking in their time, over ice and snow, on lava cold and hot, up cinder-slopes and beds of mountain torrents; but this innocent-looking sand-drift proved quite as hard to climb as any of them. The sand lies wonderfully loose and light, and is as hot as if it had been baked in an oven. Into this the foot plunges ankle-deep, slipping back at every step, and leaving a huge hole into which the sand pours down again like water. Looking back, you trace your course by a succession of funnel-shaped pits, each larger than a wash-hand basin. Though your slipper be as small as Cinderella’s, the next comer shall not be able to tell whether it was a lady who went up last, or a camel. It is toilsome work, too; for the foot finds neither rest nor resistance, and the strain upon the muscles is unremitting.

But the beauty of the sand more than repays the fatigue of climbing it. Smooth, sheeny, satiny; fine as diamond-dust; supple, undulating, luminous, it lies in the most exquisite curves and wreaths, like a snow-drift turned to gold. Remodeled by every breath that blows, its ever-varying surface presents an endless play of delicate lights and shadows. There lives not the sculptor who could render those curves; and I doubt whether Turner himself, in his tenderest and subtlest mood, could have done justice to those complex grays and ambers.

Having paused to rest upon an out-cropping ledge of rock about half-way up, we came at length to the top of the last slope and found ourselves on the level of the desert. Here, faithful to the course of the river, the first objects to meet our eyes were the old familiar telegraph posts and wires. Beyond them, to north and south, a crowd of peaks closed in the view; but westward, a rolling waste of hillock and hollow opened away to where the sun, a crimson globe, had already half-vanished below the rim of the world.

One could not resist going a few steps farther, just to touch the nearest of those telegraph posts. It was like reaching out a hand toward home.

When the sun dropped we turned back. The valley below was already steeped in dusk. The Nile, glimmering like a coiled snake in the shade, reflected the evening sky in three separate reaches. On the Arabian side a far-off mountain-chain stood out, purple and jagged, against the eastern horizon.

To come down was easy. Driving our heels well into the sand, we half ran, half glissaded, and soon reached the bottom. Here we were met by an old Nubian woman, who had trudged up in all haste from the nearest village to question our sailors about one Yûsef, her son, of whom she had heard nothing for nearly a year. She was a very poor old woman—a widow—and this Yûsef was her only son. Hoping to better himself he had worked his passage to Cairo in a cargo-boat some eighteen months ago. Twice since then he had sent her messages and money; but now eleven months had gone by in silence, and she feared he must be dead. Meanwhile her date-palm, taxed to the full value of its produce, had this year yielded not a piaster of profit. Her mud hut had fallen in, and there was no Yûsef to repair it. Old and sick, she now could only beg; and her neighbors, by whose charity she subsisted, were but a shade less poor than herself.

Our men knew nothing of the missing Yûsef. Reïs Hassan promised when he went back to make inquiries among the boatmen of Boulak. “But then,” he added, “there are so many Yûsefs in Cairo!”

It made one’s heart ache to see the tremulous eagerness with which the poor soul put her questions, and the crushed look in her face when she turned away.

And now, being fortunate in respect of the wind, which for the most part blows steadily from the north between sunrise and sunset, we make good progress, and for the next ten days live pretty much on board our dahabeeyah. The main features of the landscape go on repeating themselves with but little variation from day to day. The mountains wear their habitual livery of black and gold. The river, now widening, now narrowing, flows between banks blossoming with lentils and lupins. With these, and yellow acacia-tufts, and blue castor-oil berries, and the weird coloquintida, with its downy leaf and milky juice and puff-bladder fruit, like a green peach tinged with purple, we make our daily bouquet for the dinner-table. All other flowers have vanished, and even these are hard to get in a land where every green blade is precious to the grower.

Now, too, the climate becomes sensibly warmer. The heat of the sun is so great at midday that, even with the north breeze blowing, we can no longer sit on deck between twelve and three. Toward sundown, when the wind drops, it turns so sultry that to take a walk on shore comes to be regarded as a duty rather than as a pleasure. Thanks, however, to that indomitable painter who is always ready for an afternoon excursion, we do sometimes walk for an hour before dinner; striking off generally into the desert; looking for onyxes and carnelians among the pebbles that here and there strew the surface of the sand, and watching in vain for jackals and desert-hares.

Sometimes we follow the banks instead of the desert, coming now and then to a creaking sakkieh turned by a melancholy buffalo; or to a native village hidden behind dwarf-palms. Here each hut has its tiny forecourt, in the midst of which stand the mud oven and mud cupboard of the family—two dumpy cones of smooth gray clay, like big chimney-pots—the one capped with a lid, the other fitted with a little wooden door and wooden bolt. Some of the houses have a barbaric ornament palmed off, so to say, upon the walls; the pattern being simply the impression of a human hand dipped in red or yellow ocher and applied while the surface is moist.

The amount of “bazaar” that takes place whenever we enter one of these villages is quite alarming. The dogs first give notice of our approach; and presently we are surrounded by all the women and girls of the place, offering live pigeons, eggs, vegetable marrows, necklaces, nose-rings and silver bracelets for sale. The boys pester us to buy wretched, half-dead chameleons. The men stand aloof, and leave the bargaining to the women.

And the women not only know how to bargain, but how to assess the relative value of every coin that passes current on the Nile. Rupees, roubles, reyals, dollars and shillings are as intelligible to them as paras or piasters. Sovereigns are not too heavy nor napoleons too light for them. The times are changed since Belzoni’s Nubian, after staring contemptuously at the first piece of money he had ever seen, asked: “Who would give anything for that small piece of metal?”

The necklaces consist of onyx, carnelian, bone, silver, and colored glass beads, with now and then a stray scarab or amulet in the ancient blue porcelain. The arrangement of color is often very subtle. The brow-pendants in gold repoussée, and the massive old silver bracelets, rough with knobs and bosses, are most interesting in design, and perpetuate patterns of undoubted antiquity. The M. B.’s picked up one really beautiful collarette of silver and coral, which might have been worn three thousand years ago by Pharaoh’s daughter.

When on board, we begin now to keep a sharp lookout for crocodiles. We hear of them constantly—see their tracks upon the sand-banks in the river—go through agonies of expectation over every black speck in the distance; yet are perpetually disappointed. The farther south we go the more impatient we become. The E’s, whose dahabeeyah, homeward-bound, drifts slowly past one calm morning, report “eleven beauties,” seen altogether yesterday upon a sand island, some ten miles higher up. Mr. C. B.’s boat, garlanded with crocodiles from stem to stern, fills us with envy. We would give our ears (almost) to see one of these engaging reptiles dangling from either our own mainmast or that of the faithful Bagstones. Alfred, who has set his heart on bagging at least half a dozen, says nothing, but grows gloomier day by day. At night, when the moon is up and less misanthropic folk are in bed and asleep, he rambles moodily into the desert, after jackals.

Meanwhile, on we go, starting at sunrise; mooring at sunset; sailing, tracking, punting; never stopping for an hour by day, if we can help it; and pushing straight for Abou Simbel with as little delay as possible. Thus we pass the pylons of Dabôd with their background of desert; Gertássee, a miniature Sunium, seen toward evening against the glowing sunset; Tafah, rich in palms, with white columns gleaming through green foliage by the water side; the cliffs, islands, and rapids of Kalabsheh, and the huge temple which rises like a fortress in their midst; Dendûr, a tiny chapel with a single pylon; and Gerf Hossayn, which from this distance might be taken for the mouth of a rock-cut tomb in the face of the precipice. About half way between Kalabsheh and Dendûr, we enter the tropic of cancer. From this day till the day when we repass that invisible boundary, there is a marked change in the atmospheric conditions under which we live. The days get gradually hotter, especially at noon, when the sun is almost vertical; but the freshness of night and the chill of early morning are no more. Unless when a strong wind blows from the north, we no longer know what it is to need a shawl on deck in the evening; or an extra covering on our beds toward dawn. We sleep with our cabin-windows open, and enjoy a delicious equality of temperature from sundown to sunrise. The days and nights, too, are of almost equal length.

Now, also, the southern cross and a second group of stars, which we conclude must form part of the Centaur, are visible between two and four every morning. They have been creeping up, a star at a time, for the last fortnight; but are still so low upon the eastern horizon that we can only see them when there comes a break in the mountain-chain on that side of the river. At the same time, our old familiar friends of the northern hemisphere, looking strangely distorted and decidedly out of their proper place, are fast disappearing on the opposite side of the heavens. Orion seems to be lying on his back, and the Great Bear to be standing on his tail; while Cassiopeia and a number of others have deserted en masse. The zenith, meanwhile, is but thinly furnished; so that we seem to have traveled away from the one hemisphere and not yet to have reached the other. As for the Southern Cross, we reserve our opinion till we get farther south. It would be treason to hint that we are disappointed in so famous a constellation.

After Gerf Hossayn, the next place of importance for which our maps bid us look out, is Dakkeh. As we draw near, expecting hourly to see something of the temple, the Nile increases in breadth and beauty. It is a peaceful, glassy morning. The men have been tracking since dawn, and stop to breakfast at the foot of a sandy bank, wooded with tamarisks and gum-trees. A glistening network of gossamer floats from bough to bough. The sky overhead is of a tender, luminous blue, such as we never see in Europe. The air is wonderfully still. The river, which here takes a sudden bend toward the east, looks like a lake and seems to be barred ahead by the desert. Presently a funeral passes along the opposite bank; the chief mourner flourishing a long staff, like a drum-major; the women snatching up handfuls of dust and scattering it upon their heads. We hear their wild wail long after the procession is out of sight.

Going on again presently, our whole attention becomes absorbed by the new and singular geological features of the Libyan desert. A vast plain covered with isolated mountains of volcanic structure, it looks like some strange transformation of the Puy de Dôme plateau, with all its wind-swept pastures turned to sand and its grassy craters stripped to barrenness. The more this plain widens out before our eyes, the more it bristles with peaks. As we round the corner, and Dakkeh, like a smaller Edfû, comes into sight upon the western bank, the whole desert on that side, as far as the eye can see, presents the unmistakable aspect of one vast field of volcanoes. As in Auvergne, these cones are of all sizes and heights; some low and rounded, like mere bubbles that have cooled without bursting; others ranging apparently from one thousand to fifteen hundred feet in height. The broken craters of several are plainly distinguishable by the help of a field-glass. One in particular is so like our old friend the Puy de Pariou that in a mere black-and-white sketch the one might readily be mistaken for the other.

We were surprised to find no account of the geology of this district in any of our books. Murray and Wilkinson pass it in silence; and writers of travels—one or two of whom notice only the “pyramidal” shape of the hills—are for the most part content to do likewise. None seem to have observed their obvious volcanic origin.

Thanks to a light breeze that sprang up in the afternoon, we were able to hoist our big sail again and to relieve the men from tracking. Thus we glided past the ruins of Maharrakeh, which, seen from the river, looked like a Greek portico set in a hollow waste of burning desert. Next came Wady Sabooah, a temple half-buried in sand, near which we met a tiny dahabeeyah, manned by two Nubians and flying the star and crescent. A shabby government inspector, in European dress and a fez, lay smoking on a mat outside his cabin door; while from a spar overhead there hung a mighty crocodile. The monster was of a greenish-brown color and measured at least sixteen feet from head to tail. His jaws yawned; and one flat and flabby arm and ponderous paw swung with the motion of the boat, looking horribly human.

The painter, with an eye to foregrounds, made a bid for him on the spot; but the shabby inspector was not to be moved by considerations of gain. He preferred his crocodile to infidel gold, and scarcely deigned even to reply to the offer.

Seen in the half-light of a tropical after-glow—the purple mountains coming down in detached masses to the water’s edge on the one side; the desert with its volcanic peaks yet rosy upon the other—we thought the approach to Korosko more picturesque than anything we had yet seen south of the cataract. As the dusk deepened the moon rose; and the palms that had just room to grow between the mountains and the river turned from bronze to silver. It was half-twilight, half-moonlight, by the time we reached the mooring-place where Talhamy, who had been sent forward in the small boat half an hour ago, jumped on board laden with a packet of letters and a sheaf of newspapers. For here, where the great caravan-route leads off across the desert to Khartûm, we touched the first Nubian postoffice. It was only ten days since we had received our last budget at Assûan; but it seemed like ten weeks.

CHAPTER XIV.

KOROSKO TO ABOU SIMBEL.

From Korosko to Derr, the actual distance is about eleven miles and a half; but what with obstructions in the bed of the river, and what with a wind that would have been favorable but for another great bend which the Nile takes toward the east, those eleven miles and a half cost us the best part of two days’ hard tracking.

Landing from time to time when the boat was close in shore, we found the order of planting everywhere the same, lupins and lentils on the slope against the water-line; an uninterrupted grove of palms on the edge of the bank; in the space beyond, fields of cotton and young corn; and then the desert. The arable soil was divided off, as usual, by hundreds of water channels, and seemed to be excellently farmed as well as abundantly irrigated. Not a weed was to be seen; not an inch of soil appeared to be wasted. In odd corners where there was room for nothing else, cucumbers and vegetable-marrows flourished and bore fruit. Nowhere had we seen castor-berries so large, cotton-pods so full, or palms so lofty.

Here also, for the first time out of Egypt, we observed among the bushes a few hoopoes and other small birds; and on a sand-slope down by the river a group of wild ducks. We—that is to say, one of the M. B.’s and the writer—had wandered off that way in search of crocodiles. The two dahabeeyahs, each with its file of trackers, were slowly laboring up against the current about a mile away. All was intensely hot and intensely silent. We had walked far and had seen no crocodile. What we should have done if we had met one I am not prepared to say. Perhaps we should have run away. At all events, we were just about to turn back when we caught sight of the ducks sunning themselves, half asleep, on the brink of a tiny pool about an eighth of a mile away.

Creeping cautiously under the bank, we contrived to get within a few yards of them. They were four—a drake, a duck, and two young ones—exquisitely feathered and as small as teal. The parent-birds could scarcely have measured more than eight inches from head to tail. All alike had chestnut-colored heads with a narrow buff stripe down the middle, like a parting; maroon backs; wing-feathers maroon and gray; and tails tipped with buff. They were so pretty, and the little family party was so complete, that the writer could not help secretly rejoicing that Alfred and his gun were safe on board the Bagstones.

High above the Libyan bank on the sloping verge of the desert, stands, half-drowned in sand, the little temple of Amada. Seeing it from the opposite side while duck-hunting in the morning, I had taken it for one of the many stone shelters erected by Mohammed Ali for the accommodation of cattle levied annually in the Soudan. It proved, however, to be a temple, small but massive; built with squared blocks of sandstone; and dating back to the very old times of the Usurtesens and Thothmes. It consists of a portico, a transverse atrium, and three small chambers. The pillars of the portico are mere square piers. The rooms are small and low. The roof, constructed of oblong blocks, is flat from end to end. As an architectural structure it is in fact but a few degrees removed from Stonehenge.

A shed without, this little temple is, however, a cameo within. Nowhere, save in the tomb of Ti, had we seen bas-reliefs so delicately modeled, so rich in color. Here, as elsewhere, the walls are covered with groups of kings and gods and hieroglyphic texts. The figures are slender and animated. The head-dresses, jewelry, and patterned robes are elaborately drawn and painted. Every head looks like a portrait; every hieroglyphic form is a study in miniature.

Apart from its exquisite finish, the wall-sculpture of Amada has, however, nothing in common with the wall-sculpture of the ancient empire. It belongs to the period of Egyptian renaissance; and, though inferior in power and naturalness to the work of the elder school, it marks just that moment of special development when the art of modeling in low relief had touched the highest level to which it ever again attained. That highest level belongs to the reigns of Thothmes II and Thothmes III; just as the perfect era in architecture belongs to the reigns of Seti I and Rameses II. It is for this reason that Amada is so precious. It registers an epoch in the history of the art, and gives us the best of that epoch in the hour of its zenith. The sculptor is here seen to be working within bounds already prescribed; yet within those bounds he still enjoys a certain liberty. His art, though largely conventionalized, is not yet stereotyped. His sense of beauty still finds expression. There is, in short, a grace and sweetness about the bas-relief designs of Amada for which one looks in vain to the storied walls of Karnak.

The chambers are half-choked with sand and we had to crawl into the sanctuary upon our hands and knees. A long inscription at the upper end records how Amenhotep II, returning from his first campaign against the Ruten, slew seven kings with his own hand; six of whom were gibbeted upon the ramparts of Thebes, while the body of the seventh was sent to Ethiopia by water and suspended on the outer wall of the city of Napata,[70] “in order that the negroes might behold the victories of the Pharaoh in all the lands of the world.”

In the darkest corner of the atrium we observed a curious tableau representing the king embraced by a goddess. He holds a short, straight sword in his right hand and the crux ansata in his left. On his head he wears the khepersh, or war-helmet; a kind of a blue miter studded with gold stars and ornamented with the royal asp. The goddess clasps him lovingly about the neck and bends her lips to his. The artist has given her the yellow complexion conventionally ascribed to women; but her saucy mouth and nez retroussé are distinctly European. Dressed in the fashion of the nineteenth century, she might have served Leech as a model for his girl of the period.

The sand has drifted so high at the back of the temple that one steps upon the roof as upon a terrace only just raised above the level of the desert. Soon that level will be equal; and if nothing is done to rescue it within the next generation or two, the whole building will become engulfed and its very site be forgotten.

The view from the roof, looking back toward Korosko and forward toward Derr, is one of the finest—perhaps quite the finest—in Nubia. The Nile curves grandly through the foreground. The palm-woods of Derr are green in the distance. The mountain region which we have just traversed ranges a vast crescent of multitudinous peaks, round two-thirds of the horizon. Ridge beyond ridge, chain beyond chain, flushing crimson in light and deepening through every tint of amethyst and purple in shadow, those innumerable summits fade into tenderest blue upon the horizon. As the sun sets they seem to glow; to become incandescent; to be touched with flame—as in the old time when every crater was a font of fire.

Struggling next morning through a maze of sand-banks, we reached Derr soon after breakfast. This town—the Nubian capital—lies a little lower than the level of the bank, so that only a few mud walls are visible from the river. Having learned by this time that a capital town is but a bigger village, containing perhaps a mosque and a market-place, we were not disappointed by the unimposing aspect of the Nubian metropolis.

Great, however, was our surprise when, instead of the usual clamorous crowd screaming, pushing, scrambling and bothering for backshîsh, we found the landing-place deserted. Two or three native boats lay up under the bank, empty. There was literally not a soul in sight. L—— and the little lady, eager to buy some of the basket-work for which the place is famous, looked blank. Talhamy, anxious to lay in a store of fresh eggs and vegetables, looked blanker.

We landed. Before us lay an open space, at the farther end of which, facing the river, stood the governor’s palace; the said palace being a magnified mud hut, with a frieze of baked bricks round the top and an imposing stone doorway. In this doorway, according to immemorial usage, the great man gives audience. We saw him—a mere youth, apparently—purring away at a long chibouque, in the midst of a little group of graybeard elders. They looked at us gravely, immovably; like smoking automata. One longed to go up and ask them if they were all transformed to black granite from the waists to the feet and if the inhabitants of Derr had been changed into blue stones.

Still bent on buying baskets, if baskets were to be bought—bent also on finding out the whereabouts of a certain rock-cut temple which our books told us to look for at the back of the town, we turned aside into a straggling street leading toward the desert. The houses looked better built than usual; some pains having evidently been bestowed in smoothing the surface of the mud and ornamenting the doorways with fragments of colored pottery. A cracked willow-pattern dinner-plate set, like a fanlight, over one, and a white soup-plate over another, came doubtless from the canteen of some English dahabeeyah, and were the pride of their possessors. Looking from end to end of this street—and it was a tolerably long one, with the Nile at one end and the desert at the other—we saw no sign or shadow of moving creature. Only one young woman, hearing strange voices talking a strange tongue, peeped out suddenly from a half-opened door as we went by; then, seeing me look at the baby in her arms (which was hideous and had sore eyes), drew her veil across its face and darted back again. She thought I coveted her treasure and she dreaded the Evil Eye.

All at once we heard a sound like the far-off quivering cry of many owls. It shrilled—swelled—wavered—dropped—then died away, like the moaning of the wind at sea. We held our breath and listened. We had never heard anything so wild and plaintive. Then suddenly, through an opening between the houses, we saw a great crowd on a space of rising ground about a quarter of a mile away. This crowd consisted of men only—a close, turbaned mass some three or four hundred in number; all standing quite still and silent; all looking in the same direction.

Hurrying on to the desert we saw the strange sight at which they were looking.

The scene was a barren sand-slope hemmed in between the town and the cliffs and dotted over with graves. The actors were all women. Huddled together under a long wall some few hundred yards away, bareheaded and exposed to the blaze of the morning sun, they outnumbered the men by a full third. Some were sitting, some standing; while in their midst, pressing round a young woman who seemed to act as leader, there swayed and circled and shuffled a compact phalanx of dancers. Upon this young woman the eyes of all were turned. A black Cassandra, she rocked her body from side to side, clapped her hands above her head and poured forth a wild declamatory chant which the rest echoed. This chant seemed to be divided into strophes, at the end of each of which she paused, beat her breast, and broke into that terrible wail that we had heard just now from a distance.

Her brother, it seemed, had died last night; and we were witnessing his funeral.

The actual interment was over by the time we reached the spot; but four men were still busy filling the grave with sand, which they scraped up, a bowlful at a time, and stamped down with their naked feet.

The deceased being unmarried, his sister led the choir of mourners. She was a tall, gaunt young woman of the plainest Nubian type, with high cheek-bones, eyes slanting upward at the corners, and an enormous mouth full of glittering teeth. On her head she wore a white cloth smeared with dust. Her companions were distinguished by a narrow white fillet, bound about the brow and tied with two long ends behind. They had hidden their necklaces and bracelets and wore trailing robes and shawls and loose trousers of black or blue calico.

We stood for a long time watching their uncouth dance. None of the women seemed to notice us; but the men made way civilly and gravely, letting us pass to the front, that we might get a better view of the ceremony.

By and by an old woman rose slowly from the midst of those who were sitting and moved with tottering, uncertain steps toward a higher point of ground, a little apart from the crowd. There was a movement of compassion among the men; one of whom turned to the writer and said, gently: “His mother.”

She was a small, feeble old woman, very poorly clad. Her hands and arms were like the hands and arms of a mummy, and her withered black face looked ghastly under its mask of dust. For a few moments, swaying her body slowly to and fro, she watched the grave-diggers stamping down the sand; then stretched out her arms and broke into a torrent of lamentations. The dialect of Derr[71] is strange and barbarous; but we felt as if we understood every word she uttered. Presently the tears began to make channels down her cheeks—her voice became choked with sobs—and, falling down in a sort of helpless heap, like a broken-hearted dog, she lay with her face to the ground, and there stayed.

Meanwhile, the sand being now filled in and mounded up, the men betook themselves to a place where the rock had given way and selected a couple of big stones from the débris. These they placed at the head and foot of the grave and all was done.

Instantly—perhaps at an appointed signal, though we saw none given—the wailing ceased; the women rose; every tongue was loosened; and the whole became a moving, animated, noisy throng dispersing in a dozen different directions.

We turned away with the rest, the writer and the painter rambling off in search of the temple, while the other three devoted themselves to the pursuit of baskets and native jewelry. When we looked back presently the crowd was gone; but the desolate mother still lay motionless in the dust.

It chanced that we witnessed many funerals in Nubia; so many that one sometimes felt inclined to doubt whether the governor of Assûan had not reported over-favorably of the health of the province. The ceremonial, with its dancing and chanting, was always much the same; always barbaric, and in the highest degree artificial. One would like to know how much of it is derived from purely African sources, and how much from ancient Egyptian tradition. The dance is most probably Ethiopian. Lepsius, traveling through the Soudan in A.D. 1844,[72] saw something of the kind at a funeral in Wed Medineh, about half-way between Sennaar and Khartûm. The white fillet worn by the choir of mourners is, on the other hand, distinctly Egyptian. We afterward saw it represented in paintings of funeral processions on the walls of several tombs at Thebes,[73] where the wailing women are seen to be gathering up the dust in their hands and casting it upon their heads, just as they do now. As for the wail—beginning high and descending through a scale divided not by semi-tones but thirds of tones to a final note about an octave and a half lower than that from which it started—it probably echoes to this day the very pitch and rhythm of the wail that followed the Pharaohs to their sepulchers in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. Like the zaghareet, or joy-cry, which every mother teaches to her little girls and which, it is said, can only be acquired in very early youth, it has been handed down from generation to generation through an untold succession of ages. The song to which the fellâh works his shâdûf and the monotonous chant of the sakkieh-driver have, perhaps, as remote an origin. But of all old, mournful, human sounds, the death-wail that we heard at Derr is perhaps one of the very oldest—certainly the most mournful.

The temple here, dating from the reign of Rameses II, is of rude design and indifferent execution. Partly constructed, partly excavated, it is approached by a forecourt, the roof of which was supported by eight square columns. Of these columns only the bases remain. Four massive piers, against which once stood four colossi, upheld the roof of the portico and gave admission by three entrances to the rock-cut chambers beyond. The portico is now roofless. Nothing is left of the colossi but their feet. All is ruin; and ruin without beauty.

Seen from within, however, the place is not without a kind of gloomy grandeur. Two rows of square columns, three at each side, divide the large hall into a nave and two aisles. This hall is about forty feet square, and the pillars have been left standing in the living rock, like those in the early tombs at Siût. The daylight, half-blocked out by the fallen portico, is pleasantly subdued, and finds its way dimly to the sanctuary at the farther end. The sculptures of the interior, though much damaged, are less defaced than those of the outer court. Walls, pillars, doorways, are covered with bas-reliefs. The king and Ptah, the king and Ra, the king and Amen, stand face to face, hand in hand, on each of the four sides of every column. Scenes of worship, of slaughter, of anointing, cover the walls; and the blank spaces are filled in as usual with hieroglyphic inscriptions. Among these Champollion discovered an imperfect list of the sons and daughters of Rameses II. Four gods once sat enthroned at the upper end of the sanctuary; but they have shared the fate of the colossi outside and only their feet remain. The wall sculptures of this dark little chamber are, however, better preserved, and better worth preservation, than those of the hall. A procession of priests, bearing on their shoulders the bari, or sacred boat, is quite unharmed; and even the color is yet fresh upon a full-length figure of Hathor close by.

But more interesting than all these—more interesting because more rare—is a sculptured palm-tree against which the king leans while making an offering to Amen Ra. The trunk is given with elaborate truthfulness; and the branches, though formalized, are correct and graceful in curvature. The tree is but an accessory. It may have been introduced with reference to the date-harvests which are the wealth of the district; but it has no kind of sacred significance, and is noticeable only for the naturalness of the treatment. Such naturalness is unusual in the art of this period, when the conventional persea and the equally conventional lotus are almost the only vegetable forms which appear on the walls of the temples. I can recall, indeed, but one similar instance in the bas-relief sculpture of the new empire—namely, the bent, broken and waving bulrushes in the great lion-hunting scene at Medinet Habu, which are admirably free and studied, apparently, from nature.

Coming out, we looked in vain along the court-yard walls for the battle-scene in which Champollion was yet able to trace the famous fighting lion of Rameses II with the legend describing him as “the servant of his majesty rending his foes in pieces.” But that was forty-five years ago. Now it is with difficulty that one detects a few vague outlines of chariot-wheels and horses.

There are some rock-cut tombs in the face of the cliffs close by. The painter explored them while the writer sketched the interior of the temple; but he reported of them as mere sepulchers, unpainted and unsculptured.

The rocks, the sands, the sky, were at a white heat when we again turned our faces toward the river. Where there had so lately been a great multitude there was now not a soul. The palms nodded; the pigeons dozed; the mud town slept in the sun. Even the mother had gone from her place of weeping and left her dead to the silence of the desert.

We went and looked at his grave. The fresh-turned sand was only a little darker than the rest, and, but for the trampled foot-marks round about, we should scarcely have been able to distinguish the new mound from the old ones. All were alike nameless. Some, more cared for than the rest, were bordered with large stones and filled with variegated pebbles. One or two were fenced about with a mud wall. All had a bowl of baked clay at the head. Wherever we saw a burial-ground in Nubia we saw these bowls upon the graves. The mourners, they told us, mourn here for forty days; during which time they come every Friday with fresh water, that the birds may drink from it. The bowls on the other graves were dry and full of sand; but the new bowl was brimming full and the water in it was hot to the touch.

We found L—— and the happy couple standing at bay with their backs against a big lebbich tree, surrounded by an immense crowd and far from comfortable. Bent on “bazaaring,” they had probably shown themselves too ready to buy; so bringing the whole population, with all the mats, baskets, nose-rings, finger-rings, necklaces and bracelets in the place about their ears. Seeing the straits they were in, we ran to the dahabeeyah and dispatched three or four sailors to the rescue, who brought them off in triumph.

Even in Egypt it does not answer, as a rule, to go about on shore without an escort. The people are apt to be importunate and can with difficulty be kept at a pleasant distance. But in Nubia, where the traveler’s life was scarcely safe fifty years ago, unprotected Ingleezeh are pretty certain to be disagreeably mobbed. The natives, in truth, are still mere savages au fond—the old war-paint being but half-disguised under a thin veneer of Mohammedanism.

Some of the women who followed our friends to the boat, though in complexion as black as the rest, had light-blue eyes and frizzy red hair, the effect of which was indescribably frightful. Both here and at Ibrim there are many of these “fair” families, who claim to be descended from Bosnian fathers stationed in Nubia at the time of the conquest of Sultan Selim in A.D. 1517. They are immensely proud of their alien blood and think themselves quite beautiful.

All hands being safe on board, we pushed off at once, leaving about a couple of hundred disconsolate dealers on the bank. A long-drawn howl of disappointment followed in our wake. Those who had sold, and those who had not sold, were alike wronged, ruined, and betrayed. One woman tore wildly along the bank, shrieking and beating her breast. Foremost among the sellers, she had parted from her gold brow-pendant for a good price; but was inconsolable now for the loss of it.

It often happened that those who had been most eager to trade were readiest to repent of their bargains. Even so, however, their cupidity outweighed their love of finery. Moved once or twice by the lamentations of some dark damsel who had sold her necklace at a handsome profit, we offered to annul the purchase. But it invariably proved that, despite her tears, she preferred to keep the money.

The palms of Derr and of the rich district beyond were the finest we saw throughout the journey. Straight and strong and magnificently plumed, they rose to an average height of seventy or eighty feet. These superb plantations supply all Egypt with saplings and contribute a heavy tax to the revenue. The fruit, sun-dried and shriveled, is also sent northward in large quantities.

The trees are cultivated with strenuous industry by the natives and owe as much of their perfection to laborious irrigation as to climate. The foot of each separate palm is surrounded by a circular trench, into which the water is conducted by a small channel about fourteen inches in width. Every palm-grove stands in a network of these artificial runlets. The reservoir from which they are supplied is filled by means of a sakkieh, or water-wheel—a primitive and picturesque machine consisting of two wheels, the one set vertically to the river and slung with a chain of pots; the other a horizontal cog turned sometimes by a camel, but more frequently in Nubia by a buffalo. The pots (which go down empty, dip under the water, and come up full) feed a sloping trough which in some places supplies a reservoir, and in others communicates at once with the irrigating channels. These sakkiehs are kept perpetually going, and are set so close just above Derr, that the writer counted a line of fifteen within the space of a single mile. There were probably quite as many on the opposite bank.

The sakkiehs creak atrociously; and their creaking ranges over an unlimited gamut. From morn till dewy eve, from dewy eve till morn, they squeak, they squeal, they grind, they groan, they croak. Heard after dark, sakkieh answering to sakkieh, their melancholy chorus makes night hideous. To sleep through it is impossible. Being obliged to moor a few miles beyond Derr and having lain awake half the night, we offered a sakkieh-driver a couple of dollars if he would let his wheel rest till morning. But time and water are more precious than even dollars at this season; and the man refused. All we could do, therefore, was to punt into the middle of the river and lie off at a point as nearly as possible equidistant from our two nearest enemies.

The native dearly loves the tree which costs him so much labor, and thinks it the chef-d’œuvre of creation. When Allah made the first man, says an Arab legend, he found he had a little clay to spare; so with that he made the palm. And to the poor Nubian, at all events, the gifts of the palm are almost divine; supplying food for his children, thatch for his hovel, timber for his water-wheel, ropes, matting, cups, bowls and even the strong drink forbidden by the prophet. The date-wine is yellowish-white, like whisky. It is not a wine, however, but a spirit; coarse, fiery, and unpalatable.

Certain trees—as for instance the perky little pine of the German wald—are apt to become monotonous; but one never wearies of the palm. Whether taken singly or in masses, it is always graceful, always suggestive. To the sketcher on the Nile it is simply invaluable. It breaks the long parallels of river and bank and composes with the stern lines of Egyptian architecture as no other tree in the world could do.

“Subjects, indeed!” said once upon a time an eminent artist to the present writer; “fiddlesticks about subjects! Your true painter can make a picture out of a post and a puddle.”

Substitute a palm, however, for a post; combine it with anything that comes first—a camel, a shâdûf, a woman with a water-jar upon her head—and your picture stands before you ready made.

Nothing more surprised me at first than the color of the palm-frond, which painters of eastern landscape are wont to depict of a hard bluish tint, like the color of a yucca leaf. Its true shade is a tender, bloomy, sea-green gray; difficult enough to match, but in most exquisite harmony with the glow of the sky and the gold of the desert.

The palm-groves kept us company for many a mile, backed on the Arabian side by long level ranges of sandstone cliffs, horizontally stratified, like those of the Thebaid. We now scarcely ever saw a village—only palms and sakkiehs and sand-banks in the river. The villages were there, but invisible, being built on the verge of the desert. Arable land is too valuable in Nubia for either the living to dwell upon it or the dead to be buried in it.

At Ibrim—a sort of ruined Ehrenbreitstein on the top of a grand precipice overhanging the river—we touched for only a few minutes, in order to buy a very small shaggy sheep which had been brought down to the landing-place for sale. But for the breeze that happened just then to be blowing we should have liked to climb the rock and see the view and the ruins—which are part modern, part Turkish, part Roman, and little, if at all, Egyptian.

There are also some sculptured and painted grottoes to be seen in the southern face of the mountain. They are, however, too difficult of access to be attempted by ladies. Alfred, who went ashore after quail, was drawn up to them by ropes, but found them too much defaced as to be scarcely worth the trouble of a visit.

We were now only thirty-four miles from Abou Simbel; but making slow progress and impatiently counting every foot of the way. The heat at times was great, frequent and fitful spells of Khamsîn wind alternating with a hot calm that tried the trackers sorely. Still we pushed forward, a few miles at a time, till by and by the flat-topped cliffs dropped out of sight and were again succeeded by volcanic peaks, some of which looked loftier than any of those about Dakkeh or Korosko.

Then the palms ceased and the belt of cultivated land narrowed to a thread of green between the rocks and the water’s edge; and at last there came an evening when we only wanted breeze enough to double two or three more bends in the river.

“Is it to be Abou Simbel to-night?” we asked for the twentieth time before going down to dinner.

To which Reïs Hassan replied: “Aiwah” (“certainly”).

But the pilot shook his head and added: “Bûkra” (“to-morrow”).

When we came up again the moon had risen but the breeze had dropped. Still we moved, impelled by a breath so faint that one could scarcely feel it. Presently even this failed. The sail collapsed; the pilot steered for the bank; the captain gave word to go aloft—when a sudden puff from the north changed our fortunes and sent us out again with a well-filled sail into the middle of the river.

None of us, I think, will be likely to forget the sustained excitement of the next three hours. As the moon climbed higher a light more mysterious and unreal than the light of day filled and overflowed the wide expanse of river and desert. We could see the mountains of Abou Simbel standing, as it seemed, across our path, in the far distance—a lower one first; then a larger; then a series of receding heights, all close together, yet all distinctly separate.

That large one—the mountain of the great temple—held us like a spell. For a long time it looked a mere mountain like the rest. By and by, however, we fancied we detected a something—a shadow—such a shadow as might be cast by a gigantic buttress. Next appeared a black speck, no bigger than a port-hole. We knew that this black speck must be the doorway. We knew that the great statues were there, though not yet visible, and that we must soon see them.

For our sailors, meanwhile, there was the excitement of a chase. The Bagstones and three other dahabeeyahs were coming up behind us in the path of the moonlight. Their galley fires glowed like beacons on the water; the nearest about a mile away, the last a spark in the distance. We were not in the mood to care much for racing to-night, but we were anxious to keep our lead and be first at the mooring place.

To run upon a sand-bank at such a moment was like being plunged suddenly into cold water. Our sail flapped furiously. The men rushed to the punting-poles. Four jumped overboard and shoved with all the might of their shoulders. By the time we got off, however, the other boats had crept up half a mile nearer, and we had hard work to keep them from pressing closer on our heels.

At length the last corner was rounded and the great temple stood straight before us. The façade, sunk in the mountain side like a huge picture in a mighty frame, was now quite plain to see. The black speck was no longer a port-hole, but a lofty doorway.

Last of all, though it was night, and they were still not much less than a mile away, the four colossi came out, ghostlike, vague and shadowy, in the enchanted moonlight. Even as we watched them they seemed to grow, to dilate, to be moving toward us out of the silvery distance.

It was drawing on toward midnight when the Philæ at length ran in close under the great temple. Content with what they had seen from the river the rest of the party then went soberly to bed; but the painter and the writer had no patience to wait till morning. Almost before the mooring-rope could be made fast they had jumped ashore and began climbing the bank.

They went and stood at the feet of the colossi, and on the threshold of that vast portal beyond which was darkness. The great statues towered above their heads. The river glittered like steel in the far distance. There was a keen silence in the air; and toward the east the Southern Cross was rising. To the strangers who stood talking there with bated breath, the time, the place, even the sound of their own voices, seemed unreal. They felt as if the whole scene must fade with the moonlight, and vanish before morning.

CHAPTER XV.

RAMESES THE GREAT.

The interest that one takes in Rameses II begins at Memphis and goes on increasing all the way up the river. It is a purely living, a purely personal interest; such as one feels in Athens for Pericles, or in Florence for Lorenzo the Magnificent. Other Pharaohs but languidly affect the imagination. Thothmes and Amenhotep are to us as Darius or Artaxerxes—shadows that come and go in the distance. But with the second Rameses we are on terms of respectful intimacy. We seem to know the man—to feel his presence—to hear his name in the air. His features are as familiar to us as those of Henry VIII or Louis XIV. His cartouches meet us at every turn. Even to those who do not read the hieroglyphic character, those well-known signs convey by sheer force of association the name and style of Rameses, beloved of Amen.