to escape from the impression of their majesty, and be out again in the moonlight you are accustomed to. Now before you rises an obelisk, a slight shaft flying up to bathe its point in the moonlight; the night is so still and clear that you can see the compasses and boats and owls that are carved on it. And beside it you have to walk round a block of stone the size of a cottage that is but one splinter of the fallen sister that once stood head to head with it.

That is the last individual ruin I remember. By now it was a jungle of stone to me-blue, light, and black shadow, checkered and intertwined in kind of fantastic impossibility. every It was not an impression, it was not an effect: it was sheer bewilderment. Here was а slumbering sphinx, and there the stump where a sphinx had been; there a huge pillar, that had lost itself; there a temple with its stone roof hanging down in rags inside it; a headless body above you tottering against a pictured wall; a bodiless head below you, filling a large pit by itself, gasping

MEMNON.

231

up at the vault of heaven; then a sudden circle of monkey - heads on low pedestals, grinning at each other by the pale moonlight. Finally, the whole destruction seen from the loftiest pylon a tossing sea of stone-shapes leaping up in struggle, shapes bowed down in despair, shapes tangled, gnarled, and writhed together or apart; around them the eternal desert, above them the everlasting sky, all dead silent-a prodigy of unutterable collapse.

February 11.-For the last of Luxor we will take something less stupendous, something simpler and therefore more pathetic. Cross the Nile and ride half an hour through the sugar-cane stumps and the clover. There rise up suddenly the twin colossi of Memnon. At their feet tiny Arabs bustle and bellow; beside them tiny oxen tug at a creaking wheel. They sit with their immense hands resting meekly on their knees, their sightless eyes turned searchingly towards the new The ancients fabled that when the first ray of morning struck Memnon he gave out a bell-like clang in answer. But the

risen sun.

joyous sun strikes him and his mate, and they are silent; it burns on them, and they are cold; it marches up before their eyes, and they do not see. Worn and battered, patient, vast, and so very old, they reproach the allseeing sun with their bleared, blind eyes: they seem to be asking him what has become of them and theirs that were once so glorious, of their shivered homes, and their mute, irrecoverable companions.

XXI.

THE DAHABEAH.

ASSOUAN-AN ARAB BARD-LIFE ON A DAHABEAH-HOW THE

February 12.-Assouan is the southern frontier of Egypt, the terminus of the Lower Nile. And it looks like a terminus. We came to it on a lazy afternoon, too late for coffee, too early for tea. The Nile, which had been lazy too, began to show signs of a current. We tied up by a bank of yellow sand: in front of us, to the left, was a long line of palms with white houses peeping from behind them - Assouan. Beyond it a lofty rise of rock at least, it looks lofty in Egypt-met the elevation of a rocky, tree-grown islandElephantine. Between the two came down the river, still fretting from the Cataract.

It narrowed between the two elbows of rock, and turned a corner, so that it looked as if Assouan were not only the end of Egypt, but the end of the Nile.

In a quarter of an hour I was in a boat, amid my packages, pulling away up-stream for my friend's dahabeah. Lucky are the friends of my friend, for there is no corner of the world where you may not meet him, and his welcome always gives you to believe he came to this particular corner expressly to meet you. Now I was to live a couple of nights aboard his dahabeah. I had seen the sort of comfort in which Mr Cook will send you up the Nile in a party; now for the luxury when he gives you a dahabeah to yourself.

The six leather-skin rowers took hold of their clumsy oars, one hand like a cap over the butt, swung them out by the loop-of-rope rowlocks, and bent forward. As the oars took the water a seventh leather-skin, squatting idle in the bows, suddenly set up a nasal wail. I knew it at once-Arab singing; but