CHAPTER III

JOURNEYS TO THE EAST--CONSTANTINOPLE--SMYRNA--ATHENS--DIARY "UP THE NILE TO PHYLAE"

1866-1869

Leighton visited Spain in 1866. There exists apparently no letters or written record of this journey, but he made many sketches remarkable for strong and characteristic colouring.

The letter written to Mrs. Mark Pattison in 1879, already quoted, contains an amusing endeavour on Leighton's part to date the various journeys he had made in answer to questions she had asked.

"I am sorely perplexed to answer this; I can only approach an answer by a sort of _memoria technica_. I made studies in Algiers for 'Samson Agonistes'; that will give you roughly the period. This visit made a deep impression on me; I have loved 'the East,' as it is called, ever since. By-the-bye, I drew here my (almost) only large water-colour drawing, 'A Negro Festival' [the picture Leighton alluded to as 'The Niggers'], which was thought very well of by my friends. To Spain (into which I had made a raid of a few days on a previous occasion when visiting the South of France for architecture, to which I am much devoted) I went the year of the cholera. I remember this because I was going to Constantinople, but was dissuaded by a friend there because of the ravages of that epidemic. The following year I _did_ go: Vienna, Danube, Varna, Constantinople, Broussa, Smyrna, Rhodes, Athens (the greatest architectural emotion of my life, by far), &c. This was the year _before_ those poor young Englishmen were murdered on Pentelicus, up which I had been with _the same_ guide. My visit to Egypt, and up the Nile on a steamer, given me by the Khedive, was a year before the opening of the Suez Canal; I rode over the Salt Lakes with Mons. de Lesseps and a party of his friends. Damascus a year before I exhibited the 'Jew's House,' I _think_. Spain, revisited, and Morocco, the year before last. This is a roundabout way of getting about dates, but, contrary to my expectation, I think I have contrived to fix all the chief journeys approximately."

In 1867 Leighton wrote to his father:--

LLOYD STEAMER "ADRIATIC," _November 28, 1867_.

MY DEAR PAPA,--As I am likely to be busy during my very short stay in Venice, where I hope to find a letter from you, I take advantage of the leisure which I find in excess on board this steamer to begin an epistle which, however, I shall not close till I have seen yours, in case anything in the latter should require an answer. Of course my getting to the end of even this first page depends upon the state of my feelings--physical, not moral, for I am a poor sailor at best. I told you, I believe, in my last how much I had enjoyed and, as I hope, profited by my stay in Rhodes and Lindos. I am uncertain whether I added that I had received great kindness and attention from our consul and his brothers, and also from one or two other gentlemen with whom I became acquainted. Through the assistance of Mr. Biliotti (our consul) I had an opportunity, which could never present itself again, of buying a number of beautiful specimens of old Persian _faience_ (Lindos ware), chiefly plates, which will make a delightful addition to my collection of Eastern china and pottery. I know that you, personally, care little for such things, and have small sympathy with purchases of that nature; you will, therefore, be glad to hear that though I spent a considerable sum, knowing that such a chance would never again be given me, I could, _any day_, part with the whole lot for at least double--probably treble--what I gave.

The weather, which was very beautiful at the beginning--indeed during the greater part of my stay in the Island--was not faithful to me to the end; it broke up a few days before my departure, and, to my very great regret, prevented my painting certain studies which I was very anxious to take home: on the other hand, I had opportunities of studying effects of a different nature, so that I can hardly call myself much the loser as far as my work in Rhodes was concerned. In Athens, however, the effect of the absolute instability of the weather (an instability of which I have never seen the like anywhere) was that I left that place almost empty-handed, although I stayed there a week longer than I had originally intended. If, however, I got through little or no work, I had infinite enjoyment in the frequent and unvaried study and contemplation of the ruins on the Acropolis. Familiar as I was, from casts and photographs, with the sculptures and some part of the architecture which I found there, my expectations were very highly wrought, but it is impossible to anticipate, nor shall I attempt to describe, the impression which these magnificent works produce when seen together and under their own sky. Indeed, it is quite strange how one seems to read with new eyes things which one conceived oneself to have understood thoroughly before. The scenery about Athens, depending a good deal on effects of light, only rarely displayed its full beauty during my stay; sufficiently often, however, for me to see that it is of exquisite beauty, and that that part of it described by Byron in certain favourite lines of yours does not receive full justice at his hands. I had letters, as you probably knew, to Mr. Erskine, our Minister, and to Mr. Finlay, the historian; both of them received me with the greatest cordiality and kindness, as did also two or three other persons with whom I became acquainted, so that my stay was socially agreeable as well as artistically delightful; but herewith ends my journey, for heavy weather, rain, sleet, fog and the rest prevented my seeing any of the scenery of the Gulf of Lepanto, which I might as well not have visited, and although I passed Zante, Cephalonia, and Corfu under rather more favourable skies, I did not see them to advantage--_ce sera pour une autrefois_. Your letter, which I have found on my arrival, and for which thanks, does not call for any particular reply beyond that I have painted _no_ figures, though I might have been tempted by several fine heads I saw, but time only sufficed for my landscape studies, which in this journey were my chief care. The extract from the _Saturday Review_, which is highly flattering, was shown me by Mr. Finlay in Athens.

Of Venice I have nothing to say, except that my first impression of the Gallery, coming as I did straight from the Parthenon, was that everything but the very _finest_ pictures was wanting in dignity and beauty, and was _artificial_. I was much surprised myself, as the Venetian school always exercises a great fascination over me. You may infer from that what an impression of beauty Athenian Art has left on me. I was incessantly reminded, in looking both at the sculpture and architecture of the Acropolis, of the admirable words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles: those are the beginning and the end of the Greek artistic nature.

I shall be in London by the 10th, and right glad to get home again--meanwhile, with best love to Taily.--I remain, your affectionate son,

FRED. VENICE, HOTEL DE L'EUROPE.

[Illustration: SKETCH WITH DONKEY. EGYPT. 1868]

Respecting the knowledge Leighton possessed of the Greek language, he wrote in a letter to a friend, "In Greek I never got beyond Homer and Anacreon. I have just retained this, that, having read a passage in a translation (I generally read Homer in _German_ or _Latin_), I am able to feel, on referring to the original, its superiority to the foreign rendering."

In 1868 the great desire which Leighton for many years had felt to see Egypt was gratified. In October of that year he wrote to his father from Cairo:--

_Beginning of letter missing._]

I find that the Prince (the Prince of Wales) asked him in the said letter to introduce me as a personal friend of his to the Viceroy, adding that he would be obliged by anything he (Col. Stanton) could do for me. This was more than I had expected from what Col. Tait also had written me. Well, to make a long story short, I communicated to Col. S. the ambitious desires that Smart had stirred up in me, assuring him, however, that I should never have dreamt of entertaining them of my own accord. He took my case in hand at once, by asking for an audience, which the Viceroy granted as soon as he should have returned to Cairo; he was too busy to see me at Alexandria. Meanwhile Col. Stanton hinted to the secretary of H.H. what my wish was, but nothing was said to the Viceroy himself. Wednesday being fixed for my reception, I went to his palace of Abbassia with Col. S., and was there received in a pavilion in the open air, which overlooked a tract of country covered with tents in which some 5000 men were quartered. Round His Highness' pavilion were the tents of his chief ministers in attendance. It was rather a picturesque sight. The Viceroy was alone, and, having received us very courteously, and asked after the health of the P. and Pcess. of Wales, made us sit down. He then clapped his hands, and on a word from him long _tchibouques_ were brought, of which the amber mouthpieces were enriched with enormous diamonds and emeralds. A little conversation on general matters then followed between him and Col. S., after which he questioned me about my projects; and after asking whether he could assist me, and Col. S. throwing out a little hint about a steam tug to get me on quicker, he said, "Would you not rather have a steamer to go in? it is the same to me, and you will be more comfortable." Here Col. Stanton, very judiciously and promptly, said he was sure the P. of Wales would be much gratified by this mark of favour to me; so that I have only to name the day, and the vessel will be at my orders, and I shall do all I wish in _half the time_, or less, it would otherwise have taken me. I bowed myself out with my best thanks, and went home much pleased at my good fortune and at everybody's kindness. I should not forget to say also that Mr. Ross (Lady Duff Gordon's son-in-law, you know) was full of _empressement_ and kindness to me, and Lady D.G. lent me a gun for the Nile. I start in ten days or thereabouts, and hope before that to hear from you, for no letters will follow me and I shall lose sight of everybody for nearly two months. I will write again before I start; meanwhile, when you write which it will be no use your doing till _November_, address, please New Hotel, Cairo, Egypt.

And believe me, meanwhile, with best love to Taily, your affte. son,

FRED.

Happily, while Leighton lost sight "of everybody for nearly two months," he kept the following diary:--

_Wednesday, October 14, 1868._--Went on board, dined and slept.

_Thursday, 15th._--Started at about 7 A.M. There had been a storm in the night, and the east was still heavy with clouds; but the western sky was pure and soft.

At about ten caught up the Sterlings, becalmed in their dahabyeh; their crew was making a futile attempt to tow them against the current. I let out a rope and tugged them as far as Benisoef, which, owing to the additional weight, I did not reach till Friday morning (16th).

The first day's journey up the Nile is enchanting, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The sky was bright, but tempered by a glimmering haze which produced the loveliest effects; those of the early morning were the most striking. The course of the river being nearly due north, the western bank was glowing in varied sunny lights; the other seemed made up of shadowy veils of gauze fainting gradually towards the horizon. The boats that passed on the left, dark in the blaze of light, looked, with their outspread wings, like large moths of dusky brown; those on the right shone against the violet sky like gilded ivory. The keynote of this landscape is a soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple mystery of shadow; the latter perhaps especially, deep and powerful near the eye (the local brown slightly overruling the violet), but fading as it receded into tints exquisitely vague, and so faint that they seem rather to belong to the sky than to the earth. At this time of year the broad coffee-coloured sweep of the river is bordered on either side by a fillet of green of the most extraordinary vivacity, but redeemed from any hint of crudity by the golden light which inundates it. The brightest green is that of the Indian corn--the softest and most luminous that of an exquisite grass, tall as pampas (perhaps it _is_ a kind of pampas, I have not seen it close yet), and like it crowned with a beautiful plume-like blossom of the most delicate hue; seen against a dark shady bank, and with the sun shining through it, it shimmers with the sheen of gossamer.

Frequent villages animate the river's edge; they are built of unbaked bricks coated with mud, and have a most striking effect. The simplicity and variety of the shapes of the houses, with their slightly sloping sides and flat roofs, give them a certain dignity in their picturesqueness which delights me; the colour, too, is particularly agreeable, and is the most beautiful foil to the bronze-brown of the naked, or nearly naked, fellaheen and the indigo of the robes of their wives; to the sparkling white of the doves that swarm in the gardens, and to the cinder-colour of the buffaloes that wink and snooze along the bank. Every village nestles in a dense grove of date-palms, and one cannot conceive a lovelier harmony than that which is made by the combination of the browns below with the sea-green of the sweeping branches and the flame-like orange of the fruit. The acacia (here a large, massive tree, with a vigorous dark green foliage) is frequent in the villages.

The shape of the hills and mountains is very peculiar and striking. It gives the idea of a choppy sea of sand thrown up into abrupt peaks and then uniformly truncated by a sweep of a vast scythe, sweeping everything from horizon to horizon. Here and there a little peak, too low to be embraced in the general decapitation, raises its head amongst innumerable table-lands and gives great value and relief to the general outline.

Meanwhile an occasional train and not infrequent lines of telegraph poles don't add to the poetry of the scene.

Nor the flies to one's comfort! What a curse they are! they _infest_ one's face. I wonder what the epiderm of Egyptian children is made of; you see babies with a dozen flies settled, no, stuck, embedded in and round each of their eyes, and as many in and about their noses and mouths; and they make no attempt to remove them--seem absolutely unconscious of them.

Scenery this afternoon less interesting--river wider--banks more monotonous.

Opposite a place called Magaga, some fine mountains on the east bank, scored with innumerable horizontal lines marking the monotonous parallel strata of which they are composed; a characteristic peculiarity in all the Egyptian hills I have seen as yet. (The finest in outline are the Quarries opposite Sakkara, on the right bank, and like those behind the Citadel at Cairo.)

Spent the night at a village called Kolosana, not having made Minyeh owing to delay at Benisoef, where we coaled, and took leave of the Sterlings, with whom I breakfasted. The sunset before reaching Kolosana was magnificent, like a sunset at sea; almost as grand in its simplicity. Between the broad flaming sky and the broad flaming river there was only a long narrow strip of dark bronze-green bank, that seemed to burst into flame where the almost white hot sun sank scowling behind it. The after-glow was also very fine, though less grand than I should have expected. The sky was of a deep violet, and the distant rolling sand-tracks wore the most mysterious tints, faint, glimmering, uncanny, vague fawn colours, pale dun browns, and ghostly pinks.

_Saturday, 17th._--Started at dawn, and arrived at Minyeh about eight o'clock.

Stayed two hours and coaled.

Obeying the custom of the country, I have presented the crew with a sheep--great satisfaction.

Took a stroll in the Bazaars, which are rather picturesque. Minyeh is a largish place (chef lieu), and, like every second village on the Nile, disfigured by the tall chimneys of sugar factories.

There is a striking line of hills opposite Minyeh, quaintly jagged in outline and curiously regular in the marking of its strata.

Passed Beni Hassan, where I shall stop on my return.

It is curious to see the incessant toiling of the natives at irrigation. The poor people literally _make_ their country every year, and it is marvellous to see how a narrow fillet of water will, as by enchantment, conjure up in a few weeks an oasis out of an arid desert. The land of Egypt is born afresh out of the Nile every returning year.

I observe, with pleasure, in this part of the country those little white-domed tombs of Sheykhs which make such a pretty feature in the landscape of Algeria.

At Minyeh there is one, close to the riverside, in which rests the "Sheykh of the Crocodiles" whose holy dust prevents those man-eating ornaments of the Upper Nile from going any further towards Cairo--below this tomb they never venture.

Not having reached Manfalut by sunset, we have drawn up for the night by the bank of the river, nowhere in particular. This entire freedom in our movements (I should say _mine_, for the steamer stops exactly where, when, and as often as I choose) is very agreeable. Less pleasant is the storm of flies and insects of every kind, that rush in literally by myriads as soon as candles are lighted within reach of shore; my tablecloth is darkened with thousands of little flies no larger, wings and all, than a moderate flea; the nuisance is intolerable.

A wonderful sunset again this evening. The western bank like yesterday was low and brown and green, but, unlike yesterday, it was alive with the sweet clamour of many birds. On the eastern side the long wall of rock which seems to enclose the whole length of the valley of the Nile came flush, or almost flush, to the water's edge; and with what an intense glory it glowed! The great hills seemed clad in burnished armour of gold fringed and girt below with green and dark purple; but the smooth face of the water was like copper, burnished and inlaid with sapphire.

I sat in the long gloaming enjoying the soft, warm, supple air, and watching the tints gradually change and die round the sweep of the horizon, and across the immense mirror of the Nile as broad as a lake. It was enchanting to watch the subtle gradations by which the tawny orange trees that glowed like embers in the west, passed through strange golden browns to uncertain gloomy violet, and finally to the hot indigo of the eastern sky where some lingering after-glow still flushed the dusky hills; and still more enchanting to watch the same tones on the unruffled expanse of the water, slightly tempered by its colour and subdued to greater mystery. A solemn peace was over everything. Occasionally a boat drifted slowly past with outspread wings, in colour like an opal or lapis lazuli, and then vanished. It was a thing to remember.

I hear an altercation between Ottilio (my Italian waiter) and a stoker who has put down his grease can on one of the Pasha's smartest plates. "O--(adjective)--Madonna! se si puo vedere una carogua simile! e se me la rompi pas? costa piu di te--sa!"

My young dragoman having fastened a hook to a bit of string, and the bit of string to the stern of the steamer, has been waiting some hours for a fish. After the first hour he reasoned with himself, and said: "Brabs (perhaps?) he know!"--then, dolefully, "He come touch the 'ook, and then he go run away!"--_cela c'est vu._ To-morrow to Asyoot. 10-1/2 P.M. Just been on deck again. Dragoman still fishing! He says, "I tink he _won't_." I incline to agree with him.

_Sunday, 18th._--Started about six. Reached Syoot, or rather El Hamza for Syoot, which is a mile inland, at eleven. Between Manfalut and Syoot the Nile takes an immense sweep west, and assumes altogether a tortuous course; the plain opens out, the eastern mountains recede, and for the first time an important chain closes in on the west. Game is already beginning to be abundant. I saw a sandbank full of pelicans and geese just below this place. I wish I could get at the names of the small birds I see here, which are mostly new to me; an Arab invariably answers your questions on this subject by the word "asfoor," _i.e._ a bird--thankee! The peasants here all wear a loose dark brown robe like that of a Franciscan monk; and as they squat fishing on the brown bank of the river with their skull-caps and black beards, I fancy I see the monks of the Thebaid coming, as in old days, to get their daily meat out of the Nile.

Irrigation seems to go on more actively even than lower down; I saw to-day no less than twenty-four shadoofs all in a row, and in full play. The men that worked them, mostly naked, were of every colour between a new halfpenny and an old shoe, and the effect of them all toiling away and surrounded by groups of squatting onlookers was very striking.

Hosseyn, my servant, the angler, is having his head shaved on deck; when he has done I shall visit the town.

Meanwhile I have had a visit from the government doctor, a rather intelligent man who made his studies in Pisa.

Pipes and coffee as usual.

Here comes Hosseyn clean-shaven. He is a nice boy, eager and willing--but wants varnish; he can never address me without scratching his spine at its lowest extremity; Audrey herself could not have done it in a manner more naively unconventional. Though only twenty, he has had two wives; not liking the first, who snubbed his relations, he gave her three months' wages and dismissed her. To avoid further unpleasantness he then married his cousin: "She good woman--very quiet--good tongue."

The village at which we have landed is very picturesque. The mud and brick architecture is here carried out with some care and is entirely delightful. The walls are mostly crowned with an openwork finish made by a simple arrangement of the bricks which is most effective. Sometimes, as, for instance, in the cemetery, they are surmounted by crenulations like those we see in the old Assyrian monuments; the heads of the doorways are decorated with a charming sort of diapered ornament, capable of great variety and produced entirely by the arrangement in patterns of the bricks; the patterns being painted black and the ground filled in with white. The woodwork in the windows is also very pretty, and altogether the general aspect of the houses most novel and striking.

Beyond the village I wandered into a delightful garden; a half cultivated wilderness of palm and gum trees in which one came on unexpected pergolas, and lovely garden trees all pouring out their most intoxicating scents under the fiercest sun I ever walked beneath. I saw oleanders, the flowers of which were as thick as roses and smelt like a quintessence of nectarines; there were also some beautiful olive trees with weeping branches--a thing I had never seen before--and with berries as large as plums. Overhead, amongst the yellow dates, sat doves the colour of pale violets.

Syoot itself is beautifully situated amongst groves and gardens; except in that it is brown and not white, it reminded me much of an Algerine town; it is very unlike Cairo. The rock-cut tombs in the mountain above the town are so mutilated and disfigured that little can be made of them; but they have that stamp of vastness which is so characteristic of all the ancient monuments of this country.

The view from the height is very fine. The river has barely begun to fall yet, so that everything is reflected in the great sheets of water that cover the land. At evening I saw the sunset through the tall palm trees, with the domes of Syoot dark against its flaming light.

For a fine showy assertion that looks very original and striking, but is not calculated for pedantic verification, commend me to a Frenchman. The other day, at Boulay, Mariette Bey, the creator and the curator of the Museum of that ilk, and a man of high standing as an Egyptologist, told me that the Nile was turned into its actual course by a great chain of hills at Syoot which, serving as a rampart, alone prevented it from following its obvious tendency to flow into the Red Sea. "Il allait _evidemment_ se jeter dans la Mer Rouge;" in fact, but for this hill, there would have been no Lower Egypt, that country being literally the child of the Nile which alone prevents the sands of the central deserts from ruling over the whole breadth of the land. Here was a dramatic revelation of coincidences! Here was a startling suggestion of contingencies!

It fairly took your breath away! without that hill no Nile north of Syoot! half Egypt would not have been! No Memphis! Memphis with its wisdom! No Alexandria with its schools! No Cairo with its four thousand mosques! No Pharaohs! No Moses! (The poor devil of a sculptor who drowned himself in his own fountain because he found he had made _his_ Moses too short might have died in his bed.) No Cleopatra! (turn in your grave, noble dust of Antony!)--"forty centuries" would have had no Pyramids from which to look down on the conquering arms of Buonaparte. Mr. Albert Smith's popular entertainment would have been shorn of half its glories! Let me breathe! To what fantastic proportions did that hill grow as one thought of it!

Alas! then, for prosaic fact; and oh! for unimaginative maps! On consulting the latter I observed that, by the time it reached Syoot, the Nile had been flowing for nearly two hundred miles in a _north-westerly_ direction, away from the Red Sea rather than towards it; and on visiting the spot I saw, oh confusion! that the hills which bore the responsibility (according to Mariette) of making the history of the world what it is, were on the _western_ bank of the river!--there, at least, or nowhere, for a vast plain closes in on the east.

This evening more visitors on board--lemonade and cigars--_pour changer_; Consuls, &c. &c.--tedious.

_Monday, 19th._--Left Syoot at six, and arrived at Sohag before three. Suffered a good deal in the morning from spasms of some sort, and was not in a frame of mind to appreciate the scenery. Was, moreover, driven near the verge of exasperation by the steersman (Reis Ali), who droned select passages from the Koran, _sotto voce_, within two yards of my ears from 8 A.M. till 2 P. ditto; the same four bars over and over, for ever and for ever in one unceasing guttural strain. I trust the pious exercise did more for his soul than for my temper. Hosseyn informs me that he is about to buy a lamb, and "make him big sheep." It appears that, during a serious illness three years ago, he vowed a votive sheep to Sitteh Zehneb--the granddaughter of the Prophet--on condition that he should recover. Since then he has put her off (oh, humanity!) with candles and occasional prayer; now, at last, he is going to fulfil his vow. Admire thrift combined with piety, and observe the economy on the _lamb_.

Habit is a strange thing! Hosseyn, whose manners have been corrupted by evil communication with Europeans, occasionally attempts to use a _fork_ in the bosom of his family--particularly when salad is put before him. On these occasions his elder brother invariably asks him with grim sarcasm whether he has no fingers. Hosseyn desists at once--"Brabs he beat me!--he big!"

This evening I went out shooting amongst the palms and gum trees. It was very delightful, though ferociously hot. The village is charmingly situated; the ground prettily tumbled about, and trees and houses group themselves in the most picturesque manner. (I noticed some new mouldings over the doorways that had a very artistic effect.) I can't shoot at all; but the birds are so plentiful that something is sure to cross your gun if you only fire. I got a hawk, some doves, a dozen little birds nameless for me, and two little green birds of a kind that I have not seen before; they are quite lovely; must ascertain what they are called. The sun had set when I reached the boat, and all the dark plumes of the palm trees stood clear over the black outlines of the village; above, the new moon, a keen, golden sickle.

Hosseyn has given up fishing. "Oh, oh! nasty fish! he to laugh me!"

Was much amused this morning by the device and trade-mark on a tin of jam. (Jam, if you please, of Messrs. Barnes & Co. of Little Bush Lane _and_ Tooley Street.) The device was "Non sine labore"--and the trade-mark?--a beehive?--no!--the Pyramid of Cheops! _Excusez._

Some twenty miles above Syoot, or, say, fifteen, the eastern chain of mountains makes a bend towards the river, and for some distance ranges near it; the stream, in its usual tortuous course, sometimes flowing for a few hundred yards towards them and then for a few hundred yards in the opposite direction. I wonder whether one of these bends served as a foundation, or rather as a blind, for Mariette's astounding assertion that the Nile "allait evidemment se jeter dans la Mer Rouge." Did he "to laugh me," as the fish did by Hosseyn? Or did he merely mean to say that, if the Valley of the Nile had not turned north-west between Keneh and Manfaloot, it might have turned north-east? If so, joke for joke, I prefer the great Pyramid on the jam-pot of Mr. Barnes of Little Bush Lane and Tooley Street.

_Tuesday, 20th._--Started at about half-past five, and reached Disneh in the evening. There was a dead calm in the morning, and I congratulated myself, not for the first time, on my steamer; in a dahabieh I might have taken a week, and more, over the stretch of river I have just covered in a day; and the scenery just here, though fine, is monotonous. I am sorry for the Sterlings, who will, I fear, be unusually long getting up. This afternoon I saw Sheykh Selim, a sort of St. Simeon Stylites without the column. This holy man's peculiar form of piety consists in sitting stark naked on the bank of the river and exacting presents in money and kind from all passers-by.

Hosseyn had spoken to me at great length of his wisdom and piety, and assured me that when the crocodiles, which are numerous about here, presented themselves before the eyes of the Sheykh, he merely waved his hand and said "Biz, biz!" whereat they fled, rebuked. He informed me also that no boat refusing him tribute could expect to get on--it would infallibly be becalmed until his holiness was propitiated. To my surprise I found that my captain, a sensible old gentleman in other respects, believed this just as firmly, though he expressed his faith more vaguely. When I asked him whether the Sheykh's power extended also to steamers, which did not wait on the wind, he said: "Well, Allah was great, and though, certainly, a _steamer_ might, no doubt--so well appointed a steamer particularly--might, no doubt, get past--yet who should say? Allah was great!" In fact he believed with the best; so, of course, I said, by all means let the Sheykh be propitiated. Accordingly when we hove in sight of the little mound where he sits, and has sat for God knows how many years, we turned the steamer (a vessel of seventy-five horse-power) and ran straight in for the bank at considerable risk, it struck me, of not getting off again. The whole crew then went ashore in great excitement, headed by the captain, and surrounded the Saint, kissing his hand and salaaming. As I did not wish to hurt the old gentleman's feelings by not kissing his hand, I stayed on board and looked on. Sheykh Selim is a very vigorous-looking old fellow of the colour of a very dusky mahogany table; his hair and beard are woolly and of a dirty white; his countenance, as far as I could judge from a little distance, good-humoured and sagacious. He squats on the ground with his knees up and his arms folded across them. He inspects his presents, and asks for more. After the levee was over, and when our crew were about to come on board, he called after them and asked for roast meat, and then again a second time for oil wherewith to anoint himself. "There," said Hosseyn triumphantly, "he know everything! he know we have roast meat--how he know that?"

I was amused at the intellectual superiority of Ottilio, the Italian waiter. "Quanto sono stupidi questi Arabi!" For my part I don't see much more difficulty in swallowing Sheykh Selim than a stigmatised nun or a winking picture--I told him so.

We should have reached Keneh to-day, but the coals were bad, and we had to stop at Dishulh, three hours this side of that place. Where was thy favouring grace, O Sheykh? It appears that, like the gods of ancient Greece, the Sheykhs of Egypt have their little misunderstandings; I am told that on one occasion Selim, having a few words with another holy man thirty-five miles up the river, by name Sheykh Fadl, and waxing wroth, threw a stone at him (what are thirty or forty miles to a saint?) and blinded him of one eye; whereon Sheykh Fadl returned the amenity by throwing "some fire" at Sheykh Selim, thereby sorely burning him. "I have seen the scar," my coxswain informs me.

Killed another fatted sheep for the crew.

_Wednesday, 21st._--Arrived at Lougsor (El Uker) about three. It was too hot for sightseeing, so I waited till evening and went out shooting in a boat; at least I went out with the idea of shooting--if possible a pelican or a crane--but the birds were too shy--I could not get within fair shooting distance; wounded a pelican, but could not get after him in the deep mud. Got belated on the river, and the crew had to pull hard for an hour and a half to reach the steamer; fortunately there was a moon. Anything more good-humoured or more ineffective than the way in which the sailors pulled and shoved, I never saw; they hopped in and out of the boat in the shallows, up to their hips in the water--pushed, tugged, rowed and sang _die era im piacus_; they can do nothing without the accompaniment of some rhythmic, droning refrain, which they can keep up for an indefinite time. Anything will do; my fellows pulled on this occasion to the following words--

"Min Min_yeh_ fi Beniso_ef_,"

which is as who should say--

"From Hen_lee_ to Cookham _Reach_,"

giving the stroke and the emphasis on the last syllable.

In the evening was visited by Mustafa Aga, H.B.M. Consular Agent, one of his sons, the Turkish Governor (Hassan Effendi), and the local doctor. Mustafa is a very courteous old gentleman, with half a nose, and much respected by all who know him; I observed that Said, his son, would not smoke in his father's presence, in accordance with an Arab custom, which did not much remind me of the manner in which "the gov'nor" is treated in England.

On Thursday morning, 22nd, I started to see the tombs of the kings, leaving the eastern bank and Karnak for my return. It was a lovely morning, and I crossed the Nile before the air had had time to get thoroughly heated. On the other side I found horses, kindly lent me by Mustafa (whose son accompanied me), and donkeys for the rest of the party. There were a good many of us, and we made a very absurd-looking procession--_en tete_, a couple of fine brawny Arabs, one of whom has been the guide to these ruins since Champollion; then Said and I on our horses--mine a good-looking chestnut, caparisoned with scarlet finery; behind us, on their respective donkeys, the captain in full uniform holding a large umbrella over his head, Hosseyn in his Arab dress, the French cook in his official white jacket and cap, the Italian waiter with a large handkerchief over his head, and the engineer; further behind, lesser menials and the hamper. I forgot the Turkish Cawass in uniform and armed to the teeth. Hovering round, brandishing water-bottles, was a swarm of Arab boys and girls, in sizes, and of various qualities of chocolate; they were dressed in the most fantastically tattered remnants of dark brown shirts that I ever saw; there was one little monkey of a dull ebony colour turned up with pale blue, whose form was revealed rather than covered by a few incoherent brown shreds of garment, and who was inexpressibly droll from the way in which he cocked his little head demurely on one side with a half-consciousness of insufficient drapery.

The ride to the tombs, which takes about an hour, and the latter half of which lies through an arid valley, is very striking from the form and colour of the mountains. Nothing announces that one is approaching the city of the dead, and it is not till you stand before them that you become aware of the plain square openings which lead down to these magnificent last resting-places of the kings. It was a right royal idea this, of the old rulers of Egypt, to plunge these shafts into the bowels of the rock, and give themselves a mountain for a tombstone over the palace which was their grave. The design of these houses of the dead is simple and apparently always much the same: a long corridor, sometimes with lateral galleries, sometimes with recesses or small chambers on each side, leads downwards by a not very rapid incline to a great hall, in the centre of which is the sarcophagus which contained the mummy of the king in its magnificent case; these cases have of course been all removed. All these lateral chambers were also originally filled with mummies--those, I believe, of the relations of the sovereign. The walls of these subterranean palaces and the ceilings are adorned throughout with coloured hieroglyphs and flat sculptured "graven images" representing mostly sacred and mystical scenes, but often, also, illustrating the different trades and crafts practised by the Egyptians. These paintings are of high interest from an ethnographic point of view--Poynter would have a fit over them. In the innermost places scores of bats dart about in intense alarm. The effect of the scanty light from the candles on these painted walls and on the dark bony forms of the Arabs is extremely fine--what your literary tourist would call "worthy of the pencil of Rembrandt."

After lunching in a shady spot we took an anything but shady ride to the temple-palace of Koorneh, and from thence to the Memnonium. Both are very interesting, but the latter by far the finest; there is about it a breadth and a vastness, together with much elegance and variety, that are very impressive. Nothing that I have seen is comparable to the monuments of Egypt, for the expression of gigantic thoughts and limitless command of material and labour; withal there is about them something stolid and oppressive that is unsatisfactory; and as I looked at these vast ruins, vivid memories of Athens and its Acropolis invaded me, and the Parthenon in all its serene splendour rose before my mind; mighty, too, in its measured sobriety, stately in the noble rhythm of its forms; infinitely precious in the added glory of its sculptures; lovable as a living thing; and then more, perhaps, than ever before, I felt what a divine breath informed that marvellous Attic people, and what an ineffaceable debt of gratitude is due to them from us, blind fumblers in their footsteps.

I was less struck than I had expected to be by the two colossal statues, of one of which it was poetically fabled by the ancients that a mysterious clang rose from it as the first rays of the rising sun smote its forehead. The myth is more striking than the statues, though their size and isolation give them something impressive. I had expected them, too, I don't know why, to be in a desert, and they are in a field. How infinitely grander is the great Sphinx, with its strange, far-gazing, haunting eyes, fixed, for ever, on the East, as if expecting the dawn of a day that never comes; immovable, unchanging, without shadow of sorrow, or light of gladness, whilst the gladness of men has turned to sorrow and their thoughts to ashes before them, through three times a thousand years! Century by century the desert has been gathering and growing round it--the feet are buried, the body, the breast are hidden. How soon will the sealing sands give rest at last to those steadfast, expectant eyes?

In the evening Hosseyn had a great "fantasia" and fulfilled his vow--and spent all his money. He killed his sheep and roasted it, bought some rice and boiled it, some flour and had it made into bread; then mixing the whole, he distributed it in six very large trays; three were put before the crew, one he had placed on the wayside for all comers (and they all came); the other two were sent to the nearest mosque for the same purpose, and with similar results; then, being unable to read himself, he paid five men to recite from the Koran at night, in the mosque, and invited thereto the captain, Mustafa Aga, and his son and several others; he, the while, sitting outside and offering coffee to whoever passed by. When it was all over he came to me radiant: "El Hamdul illah," he said, throwing up his hands, "this is good! I am happy, everybody to be satisfied! this is rich day! El Hamdul illah! my money is all gone! why shall I mind? I spend it for God! brabs something good happen for me, el Hamdul illah!" His delight at the performance of his vow and his absolute faith were the prettiest thing one could see. Talking of faith, I am much struck by the dignified simplicity with which Mahometans practise the observances of their religion; praying at the appointed times without concealment, wherever they happen to be, and as a matter of course.

_Friday, 23rd._--Started early and coaled, first at Erment and then again at Esne, after which, being stopped by the night and shallow water, we anchored off a bank nowhere in particular. Heavens, what a hot day! this is indeed "the fire that quickens Nilus' slime," but has a vastly different effect on me. Sketching will be quite out of the question unless it gets rapidly cooler.

At Esne I was visited by the chief magistrate, and by the governor of the province; the former a jolly old _bonhomme_ who offered me snuff, the other a very refined old gentleman with most charming manners. Both were Turks; and as they spoke no Christian tongue our conversation was carried on entirely through a dragoman; I was, however, pleased to find that I recognised several words that I learnt last year at Constantinople; I was glad, too, to hear again that fine vigorous language, the sound of which is extremely agreeable to me. Eastern manners are certainly very pleasing, and the frequent salutations, which consist in laying the hand first on the breast and then on the forehead, making at the same time a slight inclination, are graceful without servility. When an Egyptian wishes to express great respect he first lowers his hands to the level of his knees, exactly as in the days of Herodotus.

Talking of Herodotus, here is a first-rate subject for Gerome suggested by that author; it is ethnographical and ghastly. The

## scene is laid in the establishment of an ancient Egyptian

embalmer and undertaker, fitted up with all the implements and appliances of the trade; in the background, but not so far as to exclude detail, groups of assistants should be shown busied over a number of corpses and illustrating all the different stages of preparation, embalsamation, swathing, &c. &c. In the centre a bereaved family have brought their lamented relative, and are selecting, from specimens submitted to them by the master undertaker, a style of treatment suited to their taste and means, and expressive of their particular shade of grief. A large assortment of mummy-cases would form appropriate accessories and give great scope for the display of knowledge and the use of a fine brush. It seems to me that so pleasing a mixture of corpses and archaeology, impartially treated by that polite and accomplished hand, could not fail to create considerable sensation.

Took a stroll through Esne whilst the ship was coaling. The darker tints of skin are beginning to preponderate more and more; mummy colour is in the ascendant here, together with a fine Brunswick black. The _men_, I observe, spin in this country. The children are quite fascinating; they have nothing on but a little tuft of hair on the top of their shaven heads; those dazzling little teeth of theirs are wonderful to see, and funny--like a handful of rice in a coal-scuttle. Fine sunset again; the hills, ranged in an amphitheatre from east to west, showed a most wonderful gradation from extreme dark on one side to glowing light on the other. I make the profound reflection that no two sunsets are alike; this remark, however, does not extend to _descriptions_ of sunsets--_verb. sap._

When I saw Holman Hunt's "Isabel," his pot of basil puzzled me sorely; I had seen a great deal of basil, and have an especial love for it; but I had never seen it except with a very small leaf. I was sure, however, knowing his great accuracy, that Hunt had sufficient foundation for the large leaf he gave the plant in his picture; the very fellow of it is now before me in a nosegay of flowers, very kindly sent me by the old governor of Esne. As I smell it I am assailed by pleasant memories of Lindos--"Lindos the beautiful"--and Rhodes, and that marvellous blue coast across the seas, that looks as if it could enclose nothing behind its crested rocks but the Gardens of the Hesperides; and I remember those gentle, courteous Greeks of the island (so unlike their swaggering kinsfolk--if they are their kinsfolk--of the mainland), and the little nosegay, a red carnation and a fragrant sprig of basil, with which they always dismiss a guest.

As we lay anchored by the shore in the evening, the dahabiehs came sweeping past in the moonlight; and the faint glimmering of the shell-like sails, and the flutter of the water against the swift, cutting keels, and the silence of the huddled groups, and the dark watchful figure of the helmsman at the helm, were strangely fantastic and beautiful.

_Saturday, 24th._--Started at half-past five--passed Edfou (which I leave for my return) at half-past seven. Shall we reach Assouan to-day? Hosseyn's pious orgies have, I fear, turned his head, for I observed yesterday that he has taken to fishing again. "Brabs!--Insha Allah!" His interpretation of dreams is worthy of the ancient oracle-mongers; on the night before his sacrifice he dreamt that he had bought a slave, and then released it: "Wull! the slave is my sheep--is it not my slave? Wull, have I not buy it? Wull, I give it to the beebles--go!--I release it!" Whether the sheep, personally, considered itself released is problematic.

_Saturday Evening._--Reached Assouan this afternoon at four, and, after the usual visit from the governor, took a stroll. I don't yet know whether I am disappointed in the place or not. At all events it is quite unlike my expectations of it. I had imagined, I suppose from descriptions, a narrower gorge and higher rocks; in point of fact there is no gorge at all, but the river is narrowed, or, rather, split by several islands and some fine granite boulders cropping up here and there to fret the river, and announcing the rapids; otherwise the country is open enough, and original and striking in aspect; I shall know better to-morrow what I think of it all. I saw during my evening stroll, and for the first time in my life, a group of slaves, mostly girls. If I had seen them subjected to any ill-treatment I should have felt very indignant; but I am bound to own that, seeing them squatting round a fire like any other children, showing no mark of slavery, and occupied in cooking their food, scratching themselves (as well, no doubt, they might!) and looking otherwise very like monkeys, I found it difficult to realise to myself the hardship of their position, however much it may revolt one in the abstract. They were black, and uglier than young negroes generally are; their hair was arranged in an infinity of minute, highly-greased plaits all round their heads; the elder ones were draped; the youngest wore a fringe _pour tout potage_. This is a noisy night; there is a "moolid" going on on the high bank to which we have made fast, and which borders the public square. A double row of howling dervishes are squatting and rocking and howling after their kind, almost over my head. In the brief lulls during which they take breath for further efforts, I hear from the other side of the river the mournful, weary, incessant creak of the water-wheel (with its blindfold cow or camel plodding round and round and round, apparently for ever), which in this region almost entirely supersedes the hand-worked bucket. The contrast is very curious.

I have just returned the governor's visit. I found him sitting on a sofa in the piazza opposite the Government House, with half-a-dozen hand lanterns brought by the guests in front of him, and on each side a long row of benches (forming an avenue up to his seat) on which squatted and smoked numbers of picturesque folk, who looked to great advantage by the flickering glimmer of the lamps and under the soft warm light of an African moon. I sat in the place of honour, smoked my conventional _tchibouque_, drank my inevitable cup of coffee, conveyed through my dragoman the usual traveller's remarks and questions (cardboard questions, so to speak, of which I knew the answers) to my host, who, like all the Turkish officials that I have seen, has the manners of a perfect gentleman and much natural dignity.

_Sunday, 25th._--Started for Phylae at half-past seven; arrived there at nine o'clock. The road leads through a broad tract of yellow sand (where, I believe, an arm of the Nile is supposed to have flowed in remote antiquity) along which on either side crop up, in wild, irregular fashion, bumps and hillocks and hills of dark red granite, covered over with innumerable fragments of the same stone, scattered in the most incredible confusion, and having rather a ludicrous appearance of having been _left about_ and forgotten. You could get an excellent notion of the thing in miniature, by hastily spilling a coal-scuttle on a gravel walk and running away.

Above Assouan we are fairly in Nubia, and of course none but the darkest complexions are to be seen; but so large a number of negroes make their way here from the Soudan (the Nubians are not _black_, but of a beautiful dark cairngorm brown), that the whole place has an air of negro-land which is disagreeable to me. The young men, indeed, both black and brown, are sometimes extremely fine fellows (bar the legs, which are never good), but the girls, as far as one can see them, are tolerably ill-favoured, and the old women, of an ugliness which passes all belief. They are _far_ worse than apes. The ladies in this part of the country gladden the hearts of their admirers by anointing their bodies with castor oil, so that the atmosphere of their villages, however full of sweet suggestion to a native, is much the reverse to a traveller with a nose not attuned to these perfumes; the smell that greets you through an open door is a mixture of the bouquet just named, and a penetrating flavour of accumulated stuffed beasts, and naturally interferes much with my enjoyment.

At Mahatter we left our donkeys and took a boat to Phylae, a quarter of a mile, which takes half an hour owing to the rapidity of the current just above the cataract. The scenery about Phylae has been spoken of as Paradise; I never saw anything less like my notion of Paradise, and so far, therefore, I am disappointed. Original and strange it is, in a high degree. It is in fact exactly like the valley of which I spoke a little further back, only that the hills are four times as high, and water takes the place of the sand; the same breaking up of the rocks into a myriad of fragments, putting all grandeur and massiveness of form out of the question--and, with the exception of a few palm trees and a sycamore or two, the same barrenness. Looking up in the direction of Wady Halfa, the mountains appear to grow finer in outline, and a tract of very yellow sand amongst their highest crests is striking and original--gold dust in a cup of lapis lazuli. With the island itself and its beautiful group of temples it is impossible not to be delighted. Nothing could be more fantastic or more stately than the manner in which it rises out of the bosom of the river like a vast ship, surrounded as it is on all sides by a high wall sheer from the water to the level on which the temples stand. One hall in the main temple, and one only, shows still a sufficient amount of colour to give a very good idea of what the effect must have been originally; the green and blue capitals must have been very lovely. It is needless to say that here, as elsewhere, travellers have left by hundreds lasting memorials of their brutality, in the shape of names and dates drawn, painted, scratched, and cut on every wall and column, so that the eye finds no rest from them. This strange and ineffably vulgar mania is as old as the world, and the tombs of the kings at Thebes are scrawled over with inscriptions left there by ancient Greek and Roman visitors. I shall return to Phylae shortly to make a sketch or two--_Insha Allah._

Here, at last, I have found that absolutely clear crystalline atmosphere of which I had so often heard; I own it is not pleasing to me; a sky of burnished steel over a land of burning granite would no doubt be grand if the outlines of the granite were fine--but they are not. Meanwhile, perspective is abolished--everything is equally and obtrusively near, and I sadly miss the soft mysterious veils and pleasant doubts of distance that enchant one in other lands. I think it very likely that in winter one has great compensation from the exhilarating purity of the air; but just now the heat, which is simply infernal, is too trying for me to do justice to these advantages; no doubt the air is light and dry, but I feel unfortunately so very heavy and wet, that I am not in a position fully to appreciate it. Returning to Assouan in the evening, saw a dahabieh that had just got through the jaws of the cataracts, always rather a nervous matter; at least so they say; "to be very dyinger" (dangerous?), according to Hosseyn; the men were chanting a monotonous strain that had little of triumph in it, but rather conveyed a feeling of an always impending calamity escaped _this_ time; it was melancholy and very striking, I thought, in the silence of the gloaming; very likely pure fancy on my part, for I doubt whether more than a couple of boats are lost in a season, and the sailors of the Nile must be well accustomed to the dangers of these rapids; but the impression on me at the time was very strong.

_Monday, 26th._--The dragoman of the ship having a swelling of some sort on his arm, an Arab doctor was sent for, and forthwith informed him that his arm was possessed of the devil!! Went to see the island of Elephantina opposite Assouan, but saw nothing to suggest its ancient magnificence. Gave a silver farthing to a funny little child, which (the farthing) being perforated, his mother immediately tied into one of his little oily locks--an ingenious substitute for a pocket. I observed several little boys simply attired in a piece of string tied round their loins--there, Diogenes!

_Tuesday, 27th._--Began sketching, but am out of form from the heat. I am working chiefly because I am weary of idleness. I don't much care for the two sketches I have begun; they will therefore probably turn out badly. Going to try another presently.

Tuesday Evening._--Have begun a sketch which interests me more than the others; it is taken amongst the tombs and shrines on the hills south of the town towards Phylae. As my evening's work was drawing to a close, I heard a shuffling of feet a little behind me, and, turning round, saw, in the full fire of sunset, what appeared to me at first to be a procession of golden apes with dark blue robes, light blue lips, and nose-rings; on closer inspection they turned out to be Nubian women going home to their village. Hosseyn, _qui a le mot pour rire_, apparently, engaged in conversation with them, and convulsed them with laughter; the flashes of teeth were very funny to see. At last he gave them a few halfpence, and desired them to sing; whereon they set up a series of the most uncouth howls I ever heard; one baboon in particular got up and, using a flat date basket as a tambourine, accompanied her vocal performance with hops and jumps that would have done honour to any inmate of the monkey-house in the Zoological Gardens.

The twilight, walking home, was lovely. The earth was in colour like a lion's skin; the sky of a tremulous violet, fading in the zenith to a mysterious sapphire tint. "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro."

Slew another sheep--"Allah hou akbar!" (without which formula in the killing a good Muslim must not touch the meat): this sheep is no empty formality, for the unfortunate sailors would never see meat without it; they live on bread and occasional beans. This is the fourth night of the moolid, which is to last the whole week! At this very moment the tambourines of the dervishes are driving me nearly wild with their diabolic din.

_Wednesday, 28th._--Got on indifferently with my sketches; only one of them interests me much. The morning was almost cool and really delightful, but the heat was as great as ever in the daytime. I have always been unable to see the extraordinary difference which is said to exist between the length of the twilight in the north, and in southern countries; I could have read large print to-night three-quarters of an hour after sunset. Habit is everything, no doubt, as we are reminded by Herodotus, _a propos_ of a certain people who ate their dead relatives instead of burning them; but I wonder whether I should ever get accustomed to the aching, straining, creaking complaint of the water-wheel far and near, morning, noon and night, morning, noon and night; I can _just_ fancy its becoming attaching as the clacking of a mill.

I have often wondered why, contrary to all analogy, the Spaniards call oil _azedo_, which at first sight appears to be the same word as the Italian _aceto_. I find that the word is Arabic: _zeyd_. Mem.: Look up the etymology of the English word _cough_, to which no European word that I remember has any affinity, and which rather appears to be onomatopoeic. The Arabs say _kokh_ (guttural ending); is this a mere coincidence, and does the word date beyond the Crusades? I find a good many words that have a curious likeness to English. My endeavours to pick up a little Arabic are almost entirely frustrated by Hosseyn's utter inability to pull a sentence to pieces for me. In an Arabic sentence of two words (_e.g._ _azekan tareed_--if you please) he could not tell me which word was the verb! literally; I had to find out as best I could. I never saw anything to approach his obtuseness in the matter, except perhaps that of Georgi, my dragoman in Turkey. As I was sketching this evening a Nubian passed me, very grandly draped and erect, and followed by two green monkeys that were fastened by leading-strings to his belt. They toddled very snugly after their stately master and made a queer group.

_Sunday, November 1._--I am in a state of appreciative enjoyment of the comforts and civilised cleanliness of my steamer, having just returned from three or four days' roughing in the ruins of Phylae. "Roughing" is a relative term, and my trials were of a very mild description, for though I slept _a la belle etoile_ (or rather tried to sleep), at all events I had a bed to rest in, and the air at night was delightful; moreover, the commissariat was very satisfactorily managed, so that food and drink were abundant; nevertheless, I must maintain that living in an open ruin is not comfortable. I made two or three sketches, and should probably have enjoyed myself, but that on the second day I was entirely thrown off the rails by the heat whilst sketching; I thought I should get a _coup de soleil_; I was very indisposed in the evening, and utterly unable to work the next morning, so that I took the place _en grippe_, and could see nothing but the ugliness of the rocks and the wearing monotony of the hieroglyphs. Picked up in the evening, and liked the place better; made some original and striking reflections about the desirability of health.

Having heard much of the beauty of the full moon at Phylae, timed my visit to see it, and was entirely delighted. The light was so brilliant that one could read with ease, but at the same time so soft, so rich, and so mellow that one seemed not to see the night, but to be dreaming of the day. The Arabs say of a fine night, "it is a night like milk," but there is more of amber than of milk in the nights of Phylae. The rising of the moon last night was the first thing of the sort I ever saw; the disc was perfectly golden, not as in a mist, but set sharp and clear in the sky, and exactly like the sun, except that you could look at it without pain to the eyes. The effect of this effulgent light on the shoulder of the hill was magical. The last hour of the afternoon I spent in strolling about the villages, which are picturesque. The cottages are four brown, roofless walls, built of the usual unburnt brick, and coated with mud; but the doorways are always highly decorated with painted geometrical devices which, in the mass of plain, sober brown, have a very cheerful and artistic effect. The people, too, amuse me; a pleasant, gentle, grinning folk these Nubians seem; I like their jargon--after the guttural Arabic it sounds so soft and round, and the women have funny, cooing inflections of voice (pretty voices, often) that are pleasing. Some of the girls are good-looking; chiefly through the brightness of their eyes and the milky whiteness of their teeth. The coiffure of the children is too funny; it consists in tufts of hair of various shapes and patterns left on an otherwise shaven head; often a crest all down the middle and a tuft on each side, exactly like the clown's wig in a pantomime; it is irresistibly droll.

A grand sight is to see the villagers keeping the birds from their crops; they all serve in their turn, men, women, and children; they stand each on a rude sort of scaffold which rises about two feet clear of the corn; they are armed with slings from which they hurl lumps of clay at the birds, uttering loud cries at the same time. Their movements are full of grandeur and character. I wonder Gerome has never treated a subject so well suited to him. Why, too, has he never painted mine enemy the sakkea, which is even more emphatically in his way, for, besides the scope for fine and quaint forms both in the men and the animals that work it, the accessories are abundant and interesting, and there are ropes in great abundance.

_Is_ the sakkea my friend or my enemy? Its chant is so incessant that I should have to make up my mind if I stayed longer in the country; it would either fascinate me or drive me mad. As I listen in the silence of the evening, the rise and fall, the shifting and swaying of the wind bring its complaint from across the gurgling river in such a fitful way that it has the strangest and most unexpected effects: sometimes I fancy I hear deep, drowsy tones of a distant organ, sometimes the shrill quavering of a bagpipe; sometimes it is like a snatch of a song, sometimes like a whole chorus of voices singing a solemn strain in the sad, empty night; sometimes, alas! too often, like a snarling, creaking door-post.

Phylae being above the cataracts, my steamer stopped at Assouan, and I went there by donkey as before; returning, I chartered a dahabieh to see the said cataracts, of which for some days I had heard so much; amongst other things, that a ship was wrecked there three weeks ago (I saw it stuck on its rock to-day). The cowardice of the people here, at least in this particular matter, is very funny; too naif to inspire disgust: my captain, an old sailor, and the nicest old gentleman possible, told Hosseyn that nothing would induce him to go down them; I thought I observed a shade of respectful interest in his reception of me on my return from an exploit which most English _women_ would consider good fun. I make no doubt that when the water is much lower, and your dahabieh shoots a good six or eight feet drop, and goes half into the water besides, considerable excitement may be got out of it; but now that the drop is not or does not look more than about a yard, and that the whole affair consists in a few plunges and shipping a little water, the emotion is very mild, and I own to considerable disappointment, though as far as it went it was pleasant. Nevertheless I did not for a moment regret coming if only on account of the amusement I got out of the sailors and pilots; the latter were men of years; the former, fine, jolly-looking lads as one could wish to see; but their demeanour throughout was infinitely droll; they rested their feet (according to custom here) on inclined planks, up which they ran three steps with their arms well forward to fetch the stroke, getting back into the sitting position as they pulled through the water (and wonderfully fine the action looks in a large crew all pulling well together); but the contortions in which they indulged, the gnashing and grinding of teeth, the throwing back of agonised heads, the frowns, the setting of jaws, the straining of veins, the rolling of eyes, the groans, and, absurdest of all, the coming down on one another's laps and the cutting of crabs, were ineffably grotesque, and would have convulsed me with laughter if I had not controlled myself manfully. Meanwhile the pilots were howling at one another and them with all the vehemence of a violent altercation, and for no discernible reason. When they were not shrieking at one another, the crew took up the usual Arab boatmen's chant (I know no better word); one man gives out a short sentence, or name, or form of prayer (not exceeding four syllables) in a quavering treble, and the rest then repeat it in chorus in a graver key--the effect is very original. As we got within sight of the big cataract and the stranded ship, Hosseyn loudly exhorted the crew to pray to the Prophet, and all the saints who have their shrines on the heights of Assouan, to see them safely through the danger; the invitation was loudly responded to, and everybody who had not an oar to pull held up his hands and prayed with great fervour--which was very pretty, and done with the dignified simplicity which always accompanies an Arab's devotions; but it was certainly disproportionate to the emergency. When we had danced up and down (or rather down and up) three or four times, I had the curiosity to look about for the _sailor_ and waiter I had brought with me from the steamer; they were respectively green and yellow in their unfeigned terror. Then there was a nominal _small_ cataract (the first one is called the _great_ cataract), and indeed I believe there was a _third_ little commotion; then Hosseyn, throwing up his arms, exclaimed, "El Hamdul illah!! finish!!" and it was, as he said, "finish." I am utterly ignorant of the mysteries of navigation, but one figure we executed between the cataracts and Assouan struck me as novel: it consisted in turning entirely round in a wide circle to take (as it were) a fresh start; this manoeuvre we performed with much gravity and success two successive times. An elaborate salute from the guns of the dragoman and engineer, responded to with appropriate solemnity by Hosseyn, announced my return to my steamer--and, oh joy! my tub.

In the evening governor of course.

_Monday, 2nd._--Resumed work; painted for a couple of hours--badly--in a high wind at an ugly study of a view I don't like. I consider it a sort of discipline. The wind to-day is tremendously high; the dahabiehs will come flying up now. I saw my friend the captain just now sitting on the bank in the midst of an interested circle having his fortune told. There is a blessing for them that wait. Hosseyn has caught a fish! two fishes, to-day! his glee is unlimited, he is radiant; when that boy is at the near end of his fishing rope, he is so absorbed I can't get him to attend to me or to answer a question. His brilliant piscatorial success is an opportune set-off against a chagrin the poor boy had this morning; he was taking a dip somewhere under the paddle-box, and lost, in putting away his clothes (_he_ thinks by a black but improbable theft), a Koran with which he travels and to which he attributes much luck; he was greatly cut up, and after telling me how much he valued the book, proceeded to inform me that it contained a little piece of wood from Abyssinia with something written on it, "some, what you call, scription," which, when worn round the neck, infallibly cured the bite of the scorpion; seeing that this announcement did not impress me as much as he had expected, he asked me with some warmth how I supposed, pray, that the snake-charmers prevented the snakes from biting them if it was not by saying something out of the Bible.

Another sheep to-day; there was some hitch about the manner of the killing which caused a little excitement; his throat was not turned to the sun (or the East?) whilst he was being slaughtered; an important matter. I observe that Turkish officials are not expected to be able to write; my captain can, but I remarked that when his secretary, a poor, wizened little thing, whose nose and trousers are far too short, but whose mouth and ears offer ample compensation through their length, brought him to-day the ship's accounts, he stamped his signature at the foot of the page instead of writing it, although he happened to have a pen in his hand; I was giving him his English lesson. Talking of accounts, the Arabs have a curious way of singing or rather intoning their sums, rocking all the while backwards and forwards like so many Dervishes. I have seen a large house of business (at Sohag) where _all_ the clerks were doing it at once; it was like a madhouse. Oh, Lombard Street, and oh, Mark Lane! what would you have felt at the sight?

_Tuesday, 3rd._--My last day at Assouan. Finished my sketches, took leave of the governor, and had a final stroll about the streets of the town, which seemed to me unusually picturesque. I remark that I invariably like a place best the day I leave it; if I am sorry to go, my regret casts a halo over it; if I am glad, my gladness makes everything brighter. How picturesque the people are! their flowing, flying draperies are wonderfully grand. I hope I may carry away with me some general impressions, but the immense multitude and rapid succession of striking things drive individual memories fatally out of the field. Sketching figures is out of the question--the effects are all too fugitive. This was also the last day of the moolid, and high time too; I met in the morning, in a narrow street, a procession of sailors carrying a boat, which they were about to deposit in the tomb of the sheykh in whose honour the moolid is held, and whose name they were loudly invoking. In front, drums and flags, and cawasses firing guns; behind, in front, everywhere, a host of most paintable ragamuffins enjoying the fun; above, over the brown house-tops, dark blue figures of women huddled peering at the procession; over them a blue sky with a minaret standing against it, a palm tree; some doves--there was the picture, it was charming. The children as usual called out, "Baksheesh howaga;" the so-called begging of the people has been ludicrously exaggerated; in the first place, only the children ask for baksheesh (I mean, of course, without the pretext of a service rendered), and in the next, they treat the whole thing as an excellent joke, and evidently have seldom the slightest expectation that they are to get anything. When you approach a village, every child, from as far as it sees you, whether from a window, or a doorway, or half-way up a palm tree, or the middle of the road, holloas out lustily, "Baksheesh, baksheesh," generally with much laughter, and frequently with a universal scamper in every direction except towards you. What I call begging is that importunate whining that clings to you, and harasses you wherever you turn in the south of Italy or Spain, and with which this clamorous performance has nothing in common. I have remarked, with regard to grown-up Arabs, that though they wrangle vehemently with the dragoman on the subject of payment, they invariably show the master a pleasant and satisfied face. I speak, of course, only of my own experience. As strange a thing as a satisfied man is a _barking_ fish; the fish that Hosseyn has caught of late--for Fortune is his handmaid now--all utter a sound which I can only describe as a faint bark; perhaps everybody knows that some fishes do this, but I did not, and my surprise was extreme. They are nasty-looking objects, all fins and teeth (a thick row of little bristle-like teeth). They are fat and shiny and most insipid eating.

_Wednesday, 4th._--Started at six down stream; my face is turned towards bonny old England again, and I feel as if I had wings. At Kom Ombo (the first halt to-day) there are some ruins on a rock which crops up abruptly by the riverside in the midst of a flat country. The morning was divine, and the view from the temple, looking north, surpassingly lovely in colour. The form was nothing much; a vast sandy plain (tigered here and there with stripes of green), and in the distance a long low nest of mountain peaks; but the colour!--the gradation from the fawn-coloured glimmering sands in the foreground to the faint horizon with its hem of amethyst and sapphire was as enchanting a thing, in the sweet morning light, as I have ever seen. The temple is fine though heavy, and less delicate in detail than Phylae. On the under surface of the architrave, between the columns, are some most curious and interesting unfinished decorations, on squares marked out in red, and showing (slight sketch) such as for instance a figure tried two ways on the same spot. The outlines are drawn out, in red also, with extraordinary firmness and freedom. Speaking of the squares, Gardiner Wilkinson--in his, I am told, most erudite, and, I am certain, most dry and heavy, guide-book--says that they were used (in the manner in which "squaring off" is practised in the present day) for the purpose of transferring a design. In this, however, he is obviously mistaken, because the squares are adapted not to the pictures but to the space to be decorated; the hieroglyphs and the figures being adapted to the squares, not the squares to them: that these squares, once made the _basis_ of the decoration and fixing its proportions and distribution, may then have been used also for enlarging a small design, or even, instead of tracing, for transferring one of the same size, is probable enough; but that was not their original function. In corroboration of this view, compare the frets and ornaments painted on the _back_ of the architrave of the Parthenon, which I have examined closely; they are painted in squares marked out with a sharp instrument, and determining the space to be decorated exactly as at Kom Ombo. The case is so entirely parallel as to suggest the idea that the Greeks learnt the practice in Egypt. The great temple of Edfou, where we stopped next, far surpasses anything I have yet seen in Egypt; not so much, perhaps, for any especial beauty of detail--although the sculptures are extremely fine--as for its general aspect, which is superb, and its wonderful state of preservation; many parts of it look as if they had been finished yesterday. The gigantic Propylaea, and the no less gigantic wall which encloses the whole of this fortress-temple, are almost entirely intact, and make it unlike any other ruin I know. The great court, a giant cloister into which one first enters, discloses the temple itself, blocked out in vast masses of light and gulfs of shade, and tunnelled through by a corridor which reaches to its extremest end; the absence of some portions of the roof, by letting the light play fantastically into the inner spaces, only adds to the mysterious grandeur of the effect. A broad, open peribolus runs round the temple, dividing it from the towering _mur d'enceinte_ which encloses the whole building. The western part of the temple is as full of staircases, secret passages, and dark chambers as any Gothic castle. Every square inch of the whole immense fabric is covered with sculptures and hieroglyphs.

I forgot to say that I stopped between Kom Ombo and Edfou at the ancient quarries of Gebel Silsily, from which the material of the sandstone temples was mostly quarried. They are extremely striking, and have a grandeur of their own. It was curious to compare them mentally with the marble quarries of Pentelicus from which Ictinus carved the Parthenon and Pheidias the Fates.

In a tomb at El Kab are some most amusing and interesting sculptures (with the colour almost intact on them) representing the various occupations of Egyptian life, agricultural, &c. The reaping of the corn and durrah is pretty--a vintage and wine-treading pleased me vastly. Had they wine in this district?

Coming upon a magnificent view, stopped the steamer for the night; want to see it by sunrise. The absurd spurious importance my steamer confers on me in the eyes of the natives is too funny. At Edfou I found the whole place _en emoi_; horses handsomely caparisoned, a most polite governor, sheykhs, and a general profusion of salaams. It appears that the viceroy had the authorities in the different places telegraphed to be civil to me; and God knows they are. I was struck with the magnificence of the population here, the men at least; they are most stately fellows. I should like immensely to paint some of them, but for that there is no time; I can only hope that something will stick to me from this dazzling multitude of fine things. We are now again in the region of doves, whose presence in large numbers affects the architecture of the villages in a most curious manner. Every house has, or rather, _is_, a dovecot, the chief _corps de batiment_ being a tower, or several towers, of which the whole upper part is exclusively affected to the doves. Their sides are inclined like the sides of the propylaea of the temples, with which they harmonise amazingly well; they are divided horizontally by bands of colour which have an excellent effect, recalling strongly the marked parallel strata of the mountains. (There is no more curious study than the concord which constantly manifests itself between national (and notably domestic) architecture, and the nature in the midst of which it grows up.) The construction of these towers is both peculiar and ingenious; they are built up entirely with earthen jars, sometimes placed topsy-turvy, but most often on their sides, and tier above tier like bottles in a cellar. The exterior is then filled in with mud, and the interior presents the appearance of a honeycomb, the cells being formed by the hollow jars; in these jars the doves have their abode. It is easy to see that by turning a few of the jars _outwards_ a very simple but pretty decoration may be obtained; a crest is added at the top by placing jars upside down at certain intervals; the bands of colour are generally divided by a string-course of bricks something after this fashion, but with much variety; and each of these string-courses is garnished with a perfect hedge of branches and twigs projecting horizontally a yard or more, and forming resting places for thousands of doves. Many houses have two towers, and the wealthier people have towers of great size subdivided again into small turrets; but in all cases the height of these edifices is the same, or nearly so, so that the villages received from them a very monumental look. The large towers are divided after the manner shown in the sketch. The natives also make to themselves curious pillar cupboards of mud (about man high), which from a distance have the oddest appearance; they look like raised pies on pedestals.

_Thursday, 5th._--Made a little sketch from the paddle-box before starting. Then to Esne to return the visit of my amiable friend, the governor; him of the flowers. There is a temple here; a heavy-looking portico of the Roman period, coarsely executed, but with a grand, cavernous look, buried as it is in the ground which rises all round it to half the height of the columns, so that you have to descend a considerable flight of steps to get at it. At Arnout, or at least within three miles of it, are a few fragments of the Caesarium. The portraits of Cleopatra and Caesarion (he is always seated on her lap), which occur here several times, would be of the greatest interest if they were not utterly conventional, and exactly like everybody else in every temple of the date. Got to Lougsor at sunset, and found no letters, no Sterlings, no Lady Duff Gordon. I trust the letters may still turn up before I go, for, if not, I shall probably lose them entirely, through my desire to get them a little earlier. In the evening dined with Mustafa Aga, and met there the American Consul-General, Mr. Hale, who had run up from Alexandria to show the Nile to a friend of his; both are agreeable men (Mr. Hale earned my warmest blessings by lending me a pile of English newspapers); there was also the Consul from Syoot with a friend of his. After dinner the dancing girls were asked in, and, presently, a buffoon who stripped to his waist and performed various antics; he was clever and a good mimic, but became terribly tedious after a short time. His performance was of the most Aristophanic coarseness. With the girls, of whom I had heard so much, I was decidedly disappointed; in the first place they were mostly ugly, one or two only were tolerably good-looking--_et encore!_ Then they were clumsily built, and their dress was quite ludicrous: it consisted in a body fitting tight to the figure and four inches too long in the waist, tight sleeves, a petticoat, in shape exactly like a pen-wiper, and very full, loose trowsers (bags) down to the feet; the whole of printed calico. In front of their waists hung a sort of _breloque_, or chain, looped up at intervals in festoons, the object of which was to jingle as they moved, and to add to the effect of certain little brass _castagnette_ cymbals which they held on the middle finger and thumb of either hand. A profusion of ornaments hung round their necks. Their dancing is very inferior to that of the Andalusian dancers of the same class, whose performance is full of a quaint grace and even dignity--inferior, too, to the Algerine dancing, to which that of the south of Spain more nearly approaches in character; it is monotonous in the extreme--very ugly for the most part, and remarkable only as a gymnastic feat; sleight of loins, so to speak. These are, however, no doubt, unfavourable specimens; I shall see the best of the kind in Keneh at the house of the Consul, who has come all the way here from that place to invite me thereto.

_Friday, 6th._--Went to the palace and temples of Medinet Haboo, with which I was delighted beyond my expectation. What pleased me most, and was an entire surprise to me, was a bit of purely secular architecture--the remains of a royal residence, with its towers flanking the great entrance, its windows of various shapes, balconies, semicircular crenelations, outer wall; in fact, identically such a building as one sees occasionally in Egyptian sculptures, and, curiously enough, as if it were a portrait of it, on the walls of the very temple to which this palace leads. The temple, too (the large one), interested me extremely from the wonderful preservation of the coloured decoration in parts of it; one really gathers an excellent idea of the original effect, and a most brilliant and magnificent (though barbarous) effect it must have been. The columns in the great hall here are of what, for want of a better word, I shall call the "ninepin" pattern; and I think on the whole I prefer it to the bell-capped pattern; because, besides its character and massive strength, there is no suggestion in it (as in the other) of the Doric order, with which comparison is obviously dangerous. As far as I can observe, there is no trace of colour on any of the propylaea, but the pylon is always richly decorated and highly coloured. This decorative importance given to the door must have had a very striking effect, and reminds me of the same peculiarity in the dwellings of Upper Egypt.

Visited a private tomb near Medinet Haboo, which is full of the most curious paintings, many of them in excellent preservation, and representing every sort of domestic and professional occupation. They are very superior in execution and character to those of El Kab. In the evening had a dinner on board: Mr. Hale and friend, Mustafa Aga and the Syoot Consuls (one of whom does not speak a word of anything but Arabic). I had also invited Mustafa's younger son, but find that he may not sit down with his father. (He accompanied me this morning, and insisted on lunching with the servants; on the other hand, my servant is addressed as Hosseyn _Effendi_, if you please! and conversed with as a gentleman. Service appears to be looked upon in an entirely patriarchal light.) The entertainment went off successfully, and Ottilio, the Italian waiter, covered himself with glory by his excellent waiting. After dinner Mr. Hale received a telegram to the effect that General Grant had been elected President of the United States, with Mr. Colfax as Vice. He was in great excitement and delight; we had a recrudescence of champagne, and gave the new President three cheers in British fashion. The news had come in _three days_ from Washington to Thebes! it is marvellous.

_Saturday, 7th._--Went to Karnak. Wilkinson advises the traveller to see this group of temples last; and wisely, for it is indeed the crowning glory of all, and must satisfy, if it does not surpass, the most sanguine expectations. The vast unfinished propylaea of the large temple prepare one by their colossal dimensions for the gigantic grandeur of the great central hall, in which one is at a loss what most to admire--the originality of the general design, combining, as it does in a surprising degree, freedom and variety with the gravest simplicity--the massive and reposeful breadth of the forms or the exquisite subtlety of the colour. The latter has of course gained very much from the blending hand of time, and is now of a most delightful mellowness, but, judging from the better preserved portions, it must have been at all times of singular beauty. It seems strange at first that a decoration consisting entirely of small blots of vivid colour on a white ground, like butterflies on a wall, can have a _large_ architectural effect; but, in fact, the _repetition_ over large surfaces of wall and column restores, through its monotony, the balance of breadth. The design of this hall is very curious: the great central nave, flanked on each side by two aisles of the same height as itself, but of less breadth (diminishing, roughly, in a proportion of 10, 7, 5), runs, as in a Gothic cathedral, perpendicular to the main entrance; beyond the second aisle, however, on either side, the lintels or architraves which connect the columns run at _right angles_ to the nave; the effect of this arrangement must have been peculiar and striking. (Too little remains now, except the columns, to enable one to form a distinct idea.) The central nave, with the aisles immediately adjoining, rises in a clerestory thirty or forty feet above the rest of the building, and was lighted by massive square windows filled with slabs of stone (sketch), perforated vertically, and of a severe and very fine (sketch) effect. These windows fill the space between the entablature of the lateral columns and of the roof of the clerestory, and must be some twenty to twenty-five feet high. I find it difficult to reconcile my eye to the far-fetched "asymetria" in the arrangement of the columns, the lesser ones standing in no definite relationship, on the plan, to the two central rows, neither immediately behind them nor half-way between them. How differently the Greeks managed these things! The inner row of columns at the east and west ends of the Parthenon differs also in size, height, and level from the outer row, and also stands back; but it is only _one row_ at each end; so that variety and play of form are obtained without a repeated jar on the eye; and an otherwise uniform rectangular plan is not gratuitously distorted. In a very ancient temple beyond and behind that of the great hall are some curious polygonal columns that have a very Doric look about them, though they are very rude and undeveloped.

The walls of Karnak are of course defaced and disfigured by the usual amount of inscriptions; one commemorative tablet, however, like a similar one at Phylae, inspires a different feeling. Both are memorials of the French Campaign in Egypt; the one at Phylae, dated "an VIII. de la Republique Francaise," alludes with simple dignity to the victorious march of the French army to the first cataract, giving the names of the generals who were fighting "sous les ordres de Bonaparte"; the other, under the same date, is a simple scientific memorandum giving the latitude and longitude of the chief towns on the Nile. It is impossible to read the first of these inscriptions without emotion: how remote from us, already, seems that stern, invincible French Republic, tracing its proud name with an undoubting finger here in the grave-dust of an empire that stood more centuries than this young giant completed years! How thickly, already, does the dust lie now on the grave of this thing of yesterday!

In writing about Phylae, I forgot to notice the henna tree, which grows in great quantities round the skirts of the temple, and has a delicious scent. In this wilderness of granite and most unsavoury haunt of bats, its perfume wafted unexpectedly on the air is infinitely delightful.

_Sunday, 8th._--Sketched.

_Monday, 9th._--Ditto. In the evening went out to shoot, but could not get near the pelicans and crows--they see you half a mile off. Returning, against stream, Hosseyn, anxious to be useful, took a _punting pole_ and _rowed_ away with an air of conviction which was worthy of the fly on the coach-wheel in the fable.

The heat, though still considerable (greater than with us at midsummer), has diminished within the last few days, and does not inconvenience me as much as it did in sketching. Towards evening, soft autumnal veils of mist rise from the smooth, swift river, and shroud everything in their mysterious folds; to-night the effect was especially striking; a pale golden sun hung in a pale golden mist, tempered so that one could look at it undazzled, and so shorn of its fires that the eastern bank, instead of burning orange, showed only a faint violet flush over its dark-brown ridges. On a dahabieh alongside me an Arab is singing endless strophes of some poem of love and war, accompanied by the thud and jingle of a tambourine; the melody, a wandering, nasal strain, full of turns and runs and triplets, appears to be entirely improvised, and is full of character and melancholy. At the end of each strophe I hear a prolonged, deep groan of approval uttered in a chorus by the audience, rising in pitch after a particularly happy effort of the rhapsodist, whose song begins again and again in mournful gusts like the song of the wind. It is dark; I only hear--don't see--the singer and his listeners.

_Tuesday, 10th._--Sketched. A frequent companion in my work is my friend, little Fatma, a sweet, small child of about five, with a bright face and two rows of the whitest teeth ever seen. She squats down snugly by my side, sometimes looking at the picture, sometimes at the painter, most often at the paint-box, at which she twiddles silently; sometimes she pensively draws a pattern with a little brown finger on my dusty boots. I remember at Rhodes, last year, a knot of little girls used to watch me sketching in the Street of the Knights; but the little Turks were not so nice as Fatma, the little Arab; some used to giggle, and some used to frown at the Djiaour; but one very chatty young lady of about six with the manners and graces of sixteen would exclaim in a little fluty voice, "Mash Allah! Mash Allah! beautiful indeed! nobody here can write like you!" (Turk., if my memory helps me: _Guzel! guzel! Bir khimse burda senci zhibi yazamas!_) I had a visit on board the other day from Mustafa Aga's youngest son, bonny and rosy as an apple. He wore a flowing robe of linen, _a ramages_, buttoned summarily and once for all at the neck, but entirely open from the neck downwards; over this an enormous embroidered jacket with anticipatory sleeves turned up at the wrists, and on, or rather about, his feet, a pair of his papa's shoes; he was irresistibly funny and pretty; an _amorino_, dressed up as the Dog Toby. He was very chatty; not so his playfellow, "Genani," the son of Abdallah, the servant of Mustafa, a putto by Raphael modelled in chocolate; a wild, black-eyed, trembling, romping, dusty, stark-naked little imp (I used to call him Afreet), and the finest child I ever saw. The nearest approach to social intercourse I could get out of him was a sudden plunge at a proffered cake; after which he would dart off with affected dismay, and frown at me through an ill-suppressed grin from behind the nearest place of safety.

_Wednesday, 11th._--Got on with my sketches. Have begun two or three rough small studies of heads. Hate sketching heads rapidly; it is unavoidably and odiously free and easy, and nearly all that is worth escapes. But I have no time for more, and, I suppose, the sketches will be useful. One man, with a face like a camel, whom I drew in profile, was annoyed (though in a general way complimentary) at seeing only one eye in the picture. This struck me as quaint; for he was _blind_ of the other; he had not been defrauded of much. My delight, in the evening, is to watch the processions of women and girls coming down to the Nile to fetch water. The brown figures, clad in brown, coming, in long rows, along the brown bank in all the glow and glory of sunset, look very grand; very grand, too, returning up the steep bank, along the violet sky, with their long, flowing folds and the full pitchers now erect on their heads (when empty they carry them horizontally). They are neither handsome individually nor particularly well made, but their movements are good, and the repetition of the same "motive" many times in succession makes the whole scene impressive and stately. There is no more fruitful source of effect in Nature or Art than iteration.

The suppleness of the limbs of the children here is extraordinary. I have seen little girls squatting like grasshoppers in the Nile drinking, _a meme_, the water in which they were standing little more than ankle deep.

An hour after nightfall the dahabieh, my neighbour, slipped her cables and began to drift down the river; but not till the rhapsodist had chanted his ditty to the approving murmurs of his little circle as on the preceding night. His singing has a great charm for me; I shall miss it. It reminds me much of Andalusian singing and moonlight nights in the Bay of Cadiz--there is about it a strangeness and a wayward melancholy that attach and charm me. It was a love song (I am told, for I could not hear the words, and should have understood very few if I had).

"Ya leyl! ya leyl! ya leyl!"--the eternal refrain of Arab songs. "Oh night! oh night! oh night! you have left a fire in my heart, oh my beloved! Oh my beloved, do not forget me!" &c. &c. &c.

A day or two ago I heard a youth calling the faithful to noonday prayer, from the gallery of a minaret, with one of the finest voices I have ever heard; he was tearing his notes from the inmost depths of his chest with that eagerness of yet unconscious passion that I have often noticed in southern children, and which to me is singularly pathetic; he retained his last notes as long as his breath allowed it, and they vibrated in distinct waves like a sonorous metal set in motion: from a little distance the effect was _saisissant_. I could not see him, and the air seemed to throb with sound as well as with heat in the sultry noon.

The departure of the dahabieh was celebrated with the usual Arab waste of powder, and all the echoes of the valley of the tombs across the river were aroused by the popping of many guns. All the consuls fired officially, everybody else fired unofficially. Hosseyn fired officiously--chuckling and nearly tumbling over; and the dahabieh itself, having opened the ball, fired again at intervals from a long distance as if it had forgotten somebody--they are too funny.

_Thursday, 12th._--More sketching. The weather, which is a little too canicular at noon, is deliciously fresh and cool for an hour after sunrise; the Arabs, however, look much aggrieved at the severity of the cold; they sit huddled in muffled groups with a pinched look that would become a British December day.

I observe that half the men in middle life have no forefinger to their right hand. They all of them mutilated themselves to avoid conscription under Said Pasha, who, however, having found them out, enlisted them all the same. A curious equality prevails here: whilst sketching two of Mustafa Aga's servants this morning, I learnt from his son that they were both his relations. One of them appears to be a particularly nice fellow, and is a perfect gentleman in his manners.

_Friday, 13th._--My last day in Thebes. When I arrived here and found neither friends nor letters, I thought, caring little for the place apart from the ruins, that I should stay four or five days; to-morrow when I leave I shall have been here _nine_, and shall go with regret. Work has exercised its usual attaching influence.

I have drawn in pencil a few heads that will be of use and interest to me. The subject of one of my studies (Mustafa's gardener) on receiving from Hosseyn two shillings for one hour's sitting, accused him, to his infinite disgust and anger, of having suppressed the _remaining_ eighteen shillings out of a putative pound which he conceived to be destined for him. _Excusez!_

_Saturday, 14th._--Got up early to finish a couple of sketches, and started at half-past eleven amidst salutes and salaams. To my great relief, the letters which I very rashly sent for from Cairo three weeks ago have just turned up at the last moment--fewer than I had expected, but a great delight: the first and only news I have received since leaving home--such are Egyptian posts!

Weather divine: the Nile like an opal mirror, reflecting without a break the faint, sleeping, sultry hills on the horizon: a lovely, drowsy scene. Arrived shortly after three at the village at which one lands for Keneh; a very cheery town about a mile inland. It is generally separated from the landing place on the river during the floods by a vast sheet of water; this year, however, owing to the calamitous lowness of the Nile, a narrow, shallow strip of water, only, intercepts the road, and a large tract of country remains untilled and unfruitful from the want of the quickening flood. Keneh is a very pretty sample of an Egyptian town; it is animated and full of colour, has some pretty minarets, some charming gardens, and more than the usual allowance of ornamental doorways: the effect of the mosaic of black and white bricks is most satisfactory, and has the charm which always accompanies a considerable result produced by very sober and simple means. Great relief is frequently obtained by a band or frieze of carved wood, running across the decorated surface at the springing of the arch; this band is generally carved in circles enclosing patterns and picked out with green and red. In the jambs of the door of one of the mosques, a very beautiful effect was produced by alternate bands of brickwork and minutely carved wood, _not_ coloured (three courses of brick to one band of wood).

Visited a pottery, and for the first time in my life saw a pattern-wheel and the artist at work--a most fascinating sight: the bottles and jugs flow into the most graceful forms as if by magic, and look incomparably prettier than when they are baked. I could hardly get away. A little boy scratches a pattern on them as they leave the wheel.

The Consul's white donkey, on which I ride about here, is as fleet as the wind and as oily in his movements as a two-oared gondola.

_A propos_ of consuls, Mustafa at Thebes showed me his travellers' book--in it I saw an entry of the names of Speke and Grant, with the numbers of their regiments, and the dates of their departure from Zanzibar and their arrival at Khartoum and Thebes. A simple conventional travellers' entry, as if they had returned from an ordinary journey--nothing to hint at the great achievement which brought them such honour and lasting fame.

_Sunday, 15th._--Made a sketch, a little after sunrise, of the chain of hills on the west bank of the Nile, then crossed the river to see the ruins of Denderah. Horses were waiting on the other side, and would have been most enjoyable if the weather had been cool; but, under a fierce sun, absolutely incessant prancing and waltzing ("he make 'fantasia,'" quoth Hosseyn) was fatiguing after a bit. Was so much struck with the beauties of the mountains, as seen from the left bank, that I resolved to stay a couple of days to paint them. The temple is extremely fine, and in parts unusually well preserved--_the sculpture_, that is, for the colour is almost entirely lost. These sculptures, being of a late period (Roman), are clumsy enough; on the other hand the general scheme of decoration is more artistic, more varied in distribution and rhythm than in most of the temples. On the external wall I remarked here, as at Edfou and at Medinet Haboo, massive and very handsome gargoyles--half a lion, couchant, on a large bracket, the water flowing from a spout between the paws--a more important feature in the architectural aspect of the wall than in northern countries, and calculated for five months' rain rather than for five minutes', which is the average annual fall here, I believe. This temple boasts a portrait of Cleopatra on a large scale, but, like those of Armout and Karnak, it is absolutely conventional, and any pretence of detecting an individuality is mere humbug. One fancies at first one has discovered some peculiarity in the features, but on a candid examination one must own that the same peculiarities occur in other faces on the same wall, or that they are owing to the mutilation to which two-thirds of the figures in all Egyptian temples has been assiduously subjected. In a lateral chamber of the temple, on the ceiling, is a most striking mystical design, representing the firmament and the sun fecundating the land of Egypt. It is fantastic and poetic in the extreme; it would delight Rossetti. In the evening made another sketch, and then rode to Keneh to dine with the Consul--a most interesting glimpse into a real old-fashioned Muslim interior. Si Syed Achmet (forty-five years British Agent in this town and at Khossayr) is a very wealthy old gentleman with large property in this part of the world. He is of the blood of the Prophet, a good and pious Muslim, tolerant and full of kindliness. A son, three nephews and a daughter form his immediate family circle, living with him in the house to which I was bidden--a bald, uninteresting place enough. It is entered from a narrow, irregular triangular court, ornamented on one side with some good brick and wood work, but ugly and plain on the others, and disfigured by something between a ladder and a staircase which leads to the clean but singularly naked room in which we were to spend the evening. This room was whitewashed, but so roughly bedaubed that the plain deal cupboards, the doors of which formed the only embellishment (?) of the walls, were all besmeared with ragged edges of white. Three windows, innocent of glass, and protected by a close, plain trellis-work of ordinary white wood, lighted the room, which boasted in the way of furniture the usual ugly divans, three red muslin curtains, a small deal table, two lanterns and two candles in candlesticks. Shortly after my arrival and most kindly reception by the old gentleman, who had come up from the country expressly _ad hoc_, dinner was served. The son, as the eldest, sat at table; the nephews waited on us; we squatted, I on a cushion, they on the floor, round a very low table on which was a large, round, brass tray, containing four plates, some wooden spoons, and a great many small loaves of bread arranged round it in a circle; a soup tureen, into which, after washing of hands, everybody plunged his spoon, was the central feature. After the soup, came in rapid succession several dishes containing savoury messes which were really very good, though perhaps too rich, but which I was entirely unable to enjoy in the sight of a number of hands, shining with gravy, mopping in succession at the dishes with crusts of bread, or fetching out a coveted morsel with fingers too recently licked. It is a delicate and hospitable attention to put a bit with your own hand on to your guest's plate--an attention of which I was the frequent but unworthy recipient. After the made dishes had been done justice to, half a sheep--head and all--was put on the table and _clawed_ asunder by Hosseyn. The roast being disposed of, the sweets appeared, and were eaten out of the common dish with spoons, like the soup: I was not sorry when it was over, for I had gone through all the sensations of a sea voyage. I observe that Arabs make a point of eating with as much noise and smacking of lips as possible; it is as if they were endeavouring to convey a sort of oblique expression of thanks to Providence by manifesting their relish of the blessings vouchsafed. When dinner was over, and a by no means superfluous washing of hands had been gone through, we had pipes and coffee. Hosseyn having gone to dine, I was now thrown on my own extremely limited stock of Arabic for conversation; and as I had about exhausted that during my ride to Keneh with one of the nephews, I was hard put to it. However, I just managed to get through a few broken sentences, to the great satisfaction of Achmet, who informed me that he had been for forty years the servant of the English, of whom he thought very highly, chiefly because, as he expressed it, they have "one word"--a satisfactory character to leave behind. In the evening the governor (Mudir) came to see me with a tail of employes and, if you please, a pocket-handkerchief, of which he was not a little conscious, holding it in his hand rolled into a neat tube, which he occasionally drew with dignity across the basis of the official nose. The Consul for France and Prussia also came and made his salaam. My borrowed and temporary plumes have been of real use to somebody here, for the Mudir, hearing that an Englishman (whom he erroneously supposed to be somebody) was on board a viceroy's steamer, immediately gave the crew two months' pay--an alacrity not sufficiently often displayed in this country, if I am not much misinformed. The dancing-girls who came to entertain us in the evening were no doubt better than those of Lougsor, though, with one exception, at least as ugly; but some of them were gorgeously attired (from the dancing-dog point of view), and all were a mass of gold necklaces and coins and glittering headgear, which produced at a certain distance and in the doubtful light a prodigiously fine effect of colour. The dancing was a little more varied than that of the Lougsor women, chiefly, no doubt, because they got more to drink; but, _en somme_, I am confirmed in my first impression that it is an eminently ugly performance, though a very remarkable gymnastic feat. Of course a graceful and good-looking girl may do a good deal to redeem it by personal charm, and this was in some degree the case with Zehneb, who is a noted dancer and the _fine fleur_ of the profession. She is pretty though coarse in feature, and not without grace; but has a semi-European smack about her dress and ways that spoils her in my eyes--hers, by-the-bye, are splendid. Just as the "fantasia" was at its height, a ragged, dust-soiled, old beggar came, chattering and grinning, into the room, and at once installed himself, uninvited but unhindered, on the divan, from which comfortable post he proceeded to witness the performance and apparently thoroughly to enjoy his evening. The contrast between his beggar's garb and the scrupulously cleanly attire of his neighbours was very curious. He is a fakeer, as I am told; everybody feeds him, no doors are closed to him; he is not, I believe, exactly an idiot, but is certainly in his second childhood--"rimbambito," as the Italians say. On one side of him squatted a sweet little brown girl, Achmet's daughter, of about five or six, in a pink cotton shift and with anklets hanging about her little naked feet. On the other side, a little further off, was an umber-coloured dancing-girl, with bright bold eyes painted round with black, covered with a mass of gold coins on her head, in her hair, on her ears, and round her neck, and wearing a blue silk dress all bespangled with gold. He looked like a dust-heap between them. It was a queer picture, taken out of the "Thousand and One Nights"; from which work also, I presume, the numerous one-eyed people that I see everywhere in Egypt, are copied. (I prefer this view to that of unimaginative pedants who, attaching undue importance to facts, inform me that this blindness is self-inflicted, to avoid conscription.) My ride home was a fitting close to such an evening; a fantastic procession we made, headed by a handful of torch and lantern bearers, brandishing enormous staves; after which "Meine Wenigkeit" on a sumptuously caparisoned steed, the consul's nephew, the captain, Hosseyn, a cawass, all of them on horses, others on donkeys, and odd men bustling about amongst us and dispersing the few stragglers that were to be found at that late hour in the streets. The fitful flare of the torches, dressing in fugitive, fantastic lights the gateways and dim walls of the slumbering town, had a very fine effect. More curious still was our ride _through_ a quarter of a mile of _dourah_ that stood at least ten or twelve feet high all round us; the train of light and shower of sparks in the tall graceful corn was of a surprising aspect. Except that nothing took fire, it was as if Samson's foxes had been let loose in front of us.

_Monday, 16th._--Sketched. In the evening, yielding, I own, with some reluctance, to a pressing invitation, returned to Keneh to dine with Si Achmet. Had, except the roast, exactly the same dinner as on the previous day, which leads me to conjecture that the _repertoire_ of Arab cookery is limited. After dinner we rode out to see the moolid, which is just beginning here. It is _the_ great moolid of Central Egypt, and to it, but only towards the end, flock people from all parts of the country till the concourse is enormous. It must be an interesting sight when in full swing, but as yet there is little or nothing worth seeing except the tomb of the sheykh in whose honour the moolid is held (Sheykh Abd-er-Rahim, the "Genani") to which I was taken by my host. The building was like most others of the same class in Egypt: a square chamber with a dome, and windows through which the coffin, placed conspicuously in the centre, can be seen by the pious crowds outside. On entering, I was conducted, after taking off my boots, to a post of honour, on the ground of course, in the midst of a grave circle of worthies who were squatting in the _ruelle_ between one side of the coffin and the wall. On my right was one of the civic functionaries, on my left the priest attached to the tomb. The spectacle before me was wonderful both in colour and form, though composed in great part of the simplest elements. It was like the finest Delacroix in aspect and tone, but with a gravity and stateliness of form very foreign to that brilliant but epileptic genius. To the left of me, covered with a showy embroidered cloth, stood behind a railing the sarcophagus of the saint, illuminated from above by various lanterns hung from the ceiling (the central one, and the handsomest, the gift of Lady Duff Gordon) and from the corners by gigantic candles, standing in candlesticks of proportionate dimensions; at the same corners stood great banners of sober but rich tone, which added much to the general colour. On each side of the carpet at the head of which I squatted, squatted, in far more picturesque attire, some of the notables of Keneh, half hidden in the shadow, their large turbans cast on the rich carpet they sat on. At the further end stood and stared, with the solemnity of a chorus in an opera, a motley, dazzling group of lesser folk; magnificent, too, in the flow of their draperies, the grace of the half untwisted turbans wreathed round their necks or hanging from their shoulders, the stateliness of their forms, and the fiery glow of colour in which they burnt under the clustered lanterns. Unfortunately, I could not gaze with attention as undivided as I could have wished, because the gentleman on my right insisted on making conversation, the very meagrest form of which exercise absorbed for the time my powers of attention. Hosseyn, who is very pious, bled me of an enormous baksheesh for the shrine of the saint.

_Tuesday, 17th._--Completed my sketches in the morning. In the evening, Si Achmet, his son, and three nephews, one of whom I neither knew nor had invited (this is entirely Arabic--I might, also, have taken any one with me to dine with them) came to dine on board. It was a very droll ceremony--the Arabs had, with one exception, probably never sat at a table on a chair before, but they were so entirely simple as not to be (also, by-the-bye, with one exception) at all ridiculous. Ottilio had, perhaps with a little malice, arranged the napkins in a most artistic and intricate fashion; these edifices so impressed my friends that they did not sit down opposite to their plates but on one side of them. I set them at once comparatively at their ease by requesting them, through Hosseyn, to consider themselves at home and eat with their fingers, forgiving me if I followed the custom of my country; the proposal was received with great satisfaction by the old gentleman and his son, who fell to in their own way, the father muttering his appreciation of the dishes in low, sonorous ejaculations: "Allah!"--"Mash Allah!"--"Ou Allah!"--"Ameer! Ameer!" &c. &c. &c. The son, a man of about forty, with a broken nose and a very strong squint, and whose movements carried a general impression of contemplative dreaminess, always verging on surprise, ate with his usual deliberation and spent his odd moments in contemplating a shining bunch of fingers, which he periodically and slowly licked with the utmost impartiality; he did not mix in the conversation. Of the three cousins on my left, two made a very fair attempt at using the knife and fork, though it must have been a virgin effort; the third, who had been a great deal with English people when he was consul at Khossayr, ate his dinner and put down his wine like the best European; I suspect, in fact, that he was brought as a show man. Achmet, in a climax of gratification, exclaimed towards the end of dinner, "By Allah! if the Ameer comes to my house another year, he shall be served after the Frankish custom." Arabs appear to be much devoted to _limonade gazeuse_--without being the forbidden fruit of wine itself, it dwells in bottles, and has a sort of air of crime about it which no doubt pleases them; my left-hand neighbour took off at least two bottles during dinner.

Hosseyn, whose father was a great friend of Si Achmet, proved invaluable; he hopped about like a delighted child, filling the glasses, cutting the meat of the two digitarians, and generally making conversation--a great relief to me. In the evening one of the nephews asked for some tea to take home, which I gave him; another pocketed all the tobacco that was brought them to make cigarettes. Arabs are hospitable and generous, and I like them much, but they are indiscreet in the extreme. "Arabs," says Hosseyn, "have no face; they never take shame." I have seen instances of this which I won't put down; one only, for it is very droll: my squinting friend with the pensive look asked Lady Ely last year if she would just procure for him from the Queen a title, or an order, as a mark of her regard. I am the bearer of a letter to her from him now, which I have no doubt is a reminder. Slew a sheep again.

_Wednesday, 18th._--Left Keneh early, and with regret; the place, the people and the scenery have left many pleasing pictures in my memory. I little expected at starting the annoyance that awaited me! As we approached the spot where Sheykh Selim receives his devout visitors, I sent word to the captain that I did not wish to lose any time in landing, but that the bag of money which had been collected for the saint was to be delivered, and we were to go on. I had scarcely uttered this almost sacrilegious order, when the steamer, which had been judiciously steered within ten yards of a flat, shelving bank, ran hard and fast into the mud, with the apparent intention of sticking there permanently, the engine being utterly powerless to get her out. Nobody on board doubted for an instant but that Sheykh Selim had stopped us in his resentment; the captain instantly dispatched sailors with money to propitiate him, and after a few futile attempts on the part of five or six of the crew (to loud cries of "Help us, O Prophet! help us, O Sheykh Selim!") to heave out a vessel that was four or five feet in the mud, jumped himself into a boat, and hurried, of course accompanied by Hosseyn, and leaving his vessel to take care of herself, to beseech the sheykh to get us off. Their conversation was afterwards reported to me by one who was present. "What is this, O Sheykh, that thou hast done to us? in what have we been wanting towards thee? did I not give thee a shirt when we last came by? and the tobacco, was it not good? was the roast meat not sufficient? why are we thus punished?"--to whom the sheykh: "Don't be a fool! why do you come to me about your boat? am I a sailor? how do you expect me to get her off--or on? Allah got her on the sand, not I, who am a man like yourselves." The captain: "Allah is indeed great, but if he ran us aground it was on thy instigation--thou knowest it, O Sheykh!" &c. &c. In this strain the conversation lasted at least twenty minutes, during which time and for the rest of the day I was literally sick with disgust and anger at the lot of them. Everything that ought not to be done under the circumstances, including losing the anchor (which is still at the bottom of the river), was done before evening; everything that should have been done was left undone.

Next morning (Thursday, 19th) we obtained (by force, after the fashion of this country) through the governor of the neighbouring town a gang of two hundred Arabs, magnificent fellows some of them, who, at last, by heaving and tugging, contrived to get her off--not without the most unearthly _charivari_ I ever heard. In the morning I made a sketch; reached Bellianeh in the evening, appeased, at last, and rather amused at the abject condition of the captain, to whom I had conveyed my mind (he had never seen me angry before), and who swore that in future one hundred sheykhs should not take him out of his course. My misadventure will benefit my successors in the good ship _Sheberkheyt_--_a quelque chose malheur est bon._

_Friday, 20th._--Started at seven on horseback to see Abydos, and had a delightful morning. The weather was fresh and clear, and the canter of six or seven miles across a fine open plain to the foot of the mountains where the ruins lie was most enjoyable. The temples, very strikingly situated on a slope which sweeps down from a grand amphitheatre of bastion-like rocks, have a great advantage over all those that I have yet seen, viz. that their sculptures have almost entirely escaped mutilation, and are in admirable preservation. This is the more fortunate, that they are of a very fine period, and most delicate in workmanship; the type of the faces has considerable beauty and refinement. The colours, notably in the more recently excavated temple of Osiris, are often extremely well preserved, and I am confirmed in my conjecture, that they must have been much less beautiful in their freshness than now that time has toned and tuned them. In the larger temple are some very beautiful wagon-head vaults _cut in the thickness of two layers of stone_, the upper ones laid on end to get more thickness of material. They are charmingly decorated with cartouches and stars on a blue ground, and divided by a band of hieroglyphs running like a ridge-rib along the head of the vault. The stars on Egyptian ceilings are always pentagonal, and placed very near together. At the temple I was joined by the obligato governor, a puffy Turk with a tight, shiny face that had a look of having been stung all over by a wasp; he was heavy and stupid, and I left him in the hands of Hosseyn, galloping ahead myself with the mounted cawass, a very picturesque Arnout on a very good horse. _N.B._--Never come to the East again without an English saddle; the back-board of a Turkish saddle is in the long run an intolerable nuisance, as are also, though in a less degree, the shovel-stirrups in which one's feet are imprisoned. In the afternoon reached Sohag, a sail, or rather a steam, of three or four hours, in time for a most pleasant evening's walk.

_Saturday, 21st._--Got to Syoot in the afternoon, and was very glad to catch Lady Duff Gordon on her way up the river. Was received with great hospitality by the American and Spanish consuls, wealthy Copts of this town who kindly put their carriages at my disposal and, better still, their donkeys--splendid Arabian donkeys, looking, in their trappings, like cardinals' mules. Nothing is more pleasant than the swift amble of a good donkey from the Hejaz. Dined in the evening with Mr. Wonista, the consul for Spain, quite "a la Franca" with knives and forks and the whole thing. A curious house, and the rooms small but of enormous height, so that they looked as if they had been set _on end_ by mistake. The walls were bare whitewash, but the furniture was of the most gorgeous brocade, as were also the curtains; there was a European carpet all over the floor and as many candles on the walls (in glass bells) as in a _cafe chantant_. I met there a Scotch clergyman belonging to the American Mission (Episcopalian) which is very active in Egypt. After dinner the singer from Lady Duff Gordon's boat was sent for, and in a short time arrived with some of the crew who acted as chorus; it is this chorus, I find, that gives the approving murmur after each strophe. He sang well, but his performance of course lost three-fourths of its charm by not being heard in its proper place and surroundings. I remember once in the Sabine hills hearing unexpectedly at a distance, in the silent dimness of night, the droning song of a _piffera_; nothing could be more strangely pathetic than this voice rising in the utter silence from out of the heart of the valley below--yet those same sounds heard close in the broad daylight would have seemed uncouth and strident. Arab singing has a similar quality, and is equally dependent on time and place for its full effect. Whilst the performance was at its height, and the minstrel was tuning his note to the most ambitious _fioriture_, I heard in the room overhead some European part-singing of a melancholy order, and was informed that the Scotch minister had been invited by a few proselytes to retire upstairs "to worship and explain an obscure passage in the Gospel." On the invitation of the master of the house, I went up and joined the congregation, who thought it right to favour me with another psalm. The clergyman then read in Arabic, and expounded in the same language a chapter from the Bible, and I must say did it (I speak of his manner only, for Koran and Bible Arabic is so different from the current idiom, here at all events, that I did not understand four words in the whole sermon) in a very simple and impressive way. He had, too, an admirable accent. He tells me that in spite of vehement opposition from the Coptic prelates he finds a good deal of sympathy amongst the people.

_Sunday, 22nd._--Lovely day. Strolled about with a gun. This place is full of "sparrows of paradise," a little bird of an exquisite golden green. Since I was here last, the aspect of the country has changed very much and for the better. Where I saw, a few weeks back, nothing but pools and mud, is now a vast expanse of clover and grass of an intense green, sunny and brilliant to a wonderful degree. The plain looks like one immense jewel, and contrasts deliciously with the tawny sand-rock which walls it in on the west, behind the gleaming white domes of the cemetery. Dined with the other consul in the evening. Same sort of house, but much larger. No Scotch clergyman this time, but an Anglo-Arab who teaches in the Coptic school, and, embracing Coptic views, inveighs bitterly against the converts to Protestantism. At sunset, to my agreeable surprise, the Sterlings turned up, _musique en tete_, the singer in the bows quavering a jubilant strain, and the vessel magnificent with fresh paint.

_Monday, 23rd._--Killed a sheep. Sketched. Had the consuls and the Scotch missionary to dine with me. The latter brought me some newspapers, which I read greedily.

_Tuesday, 24th._--Sketched. At last an evening to myself!--these festive gatherings are an ineffable bore, if the truth were told.

_Wednesday, 25th._--Completed my sketches with one exception--a study of my beautiful grey (_hechtgrau_) donkey. Unless I make a study at Sakkara, which is just possible, this will be the end of my work on the Nile. In twenty-two skies which I have painted there is not a vestige of a cloud, such has been the divinely serene weather I have had all along. This evening, indeed, faint, shining flakes of vapour were drawn across the sky, breaking and tempering the last rays of the sun; but by a curious piece of luck they did not appear till I was just giving the last touches to my day's work. Saw a beautiful and original effect at sunset. Just as the sun was about to sink behind the hills, a dahabieh drifted past with its sails spread, and reaching up into the region where the light was still golden, whilst the face of the water was darkened, and the long, low banks were already shadowy and grey, the burning sail was reflected in the night of the river, and looked astonishingly beautiful. It was like the mellow splendour of the rising moon.

I delight in seeing the sailors climbing the tall, oblique yards of the Nile boats. Sometimes five or six of them perch on one yard at the same time, looking at a distance like great birds.

_Thursday, 26th._--Finished my donkey and started; as I get further north, the weather is much cooler--the mornings and evenings are quite fresh, though not so cold but that I can sketch in the shade an hour after sunrise in summer clothes. The natives, however, seem to take a severe view of the temperature, and leave nothing unmuffled but their mouths, with which they occasionally blow their fingers in the most approved winter fashion. Was more struck than before with Gebel Aboofada--the infinite and strongly marked strata of which it is made up writhe and heave in a very grand and fantastic manner. Some of the Egyptian mountains are ruled like a copy book from head to foot, and are very monotonous.

At the foot of Aboofada, I saw, for an instant, my first and last crocodile; a small one. They are very seldom seen from a steamer below the cataracts, as the noise frightens away the few there are. I had looked forward to getting a shot at one, and was a good deal disappointed at finding none up the river. It is curious how rapidly time lends its perspective to the past. Every now and then a boat from the cataracts laden with dates comes floating down the river, and the melancholy chant of the Nubian sailors, as they strain at the oars, already falls on my ear as a sudden memory of an almost distant past--not a month old.

Arrived at Roda this evening. I have been reading, amongst other things, a book everybody else read thirty years ago, "Les Natchez," and am greatly disappointed with it. I am especially struck with the extraordinary contrast between the masterful sobriety and simplicity of the style, and the far-fetched affectation of the ideas which are, more often than not, distorted, tawdry and inflated, sometimes disgusting and not seldom maudlin in the extreme. This singular discrepancy between form and matter is especially French, and may frequently be traced in the works of their painters and sculptors. No living people has so sensitive a perception of form or so artistic an epiderm, but an ineradicable self-consciousness develops in them a theatrical attitude of mind which too often betrays itself in their artistic and literary conceptions. It is the absolute consent between conception and execution which constitutes one of the chief sources of delight in the art of the Greeks, to whom they are fond, too rashly, of comparing themselves.[41]

I notice in the Natchez a peculiar use of comparisons. That mode of adding light and colour to an idea which consists in suggesting analogies, has always been the delight of poets; but Chateaubriand (whose analogies, by the way, are often singularly far fetched and unfortunate) occasionally, in a morbid endeavour to be original, seeks his effects in a suggestion of dissimilarities; I remember an instance: he has been describing with minute and gratuitously sickening detail a mangled heap of dead and dying warriors after a ferocious encounter. "How different," he exclaims, but in more flowery terms, "is a haycock in a field with girls rolling down it!" Few will be disposed to contradict him. His exorbitant personal vanity which continues to peep through everywhere, and makes even his unbounded praise of his country seem an oblique tribute to himself, is droll and nauseating at the same time.

Took a stroll in the evening, and met an English baby! pink and delicate like a flower; with cape and cockade complete--a pretty sight.

Thick folds of rose and violet-coloured cloud hung along the horizon at sunset, and looked autumnal. I have left eternal summer behind me.

_Friday, 27th._--Such a morning as the evening of yesterday foreboded; rather chilly and misty, and as near an approach to winter as Upper Egypt may be expected to afford. The sky was veiled on all sides with soft grey clouds, wrinkled and fretted like the grey sands when the sea has left them. It was a fitting background to the desolate tombs of Beni Hassan, which I visited an hour or two after sunrise. The range of hills on the face of which these tombs are excavated is not unlike Gebel Aboofada in its configuration, except that the strata with which it is scored are more level and regular. This monotony is, however, relieved by the sky-line, which is extremely fine. Along the foot of these hills runs a level strip of barren land, broken abruptly in its whole length by a steep bank which rises like a ruined wall from the plain below, and which is, when the Nile is exceptionally high, the bank of the river itself. Standing, as it now does, nearly a mile inland, and crested with two deserted villages, it has a grand but uncanny aspect. I had long been eager to see the tombs, which show what is considered by many to be the first rudiment of the Doric order. The similarity, more striking even than I expected, is so great that, taken with our knowledge of the early and frequent intercourse of the Greeks with Egypt and of the assimilating power of their genius, it certainly offers a strong _prima facie_ presumption in favour of this view. It may be objected that the echinus, the conical form of the shaft and its entasis, all three inseparable features and especial beauties of the Greek order, are wanting here, though they are present in the earliest specimen of the style preserved in Greece, the temple of Corinth. This argument would deserve more consideration if it could be conceived that the order as seen at Corinth was a spontaneous conception, and not a development of some more elementary form which, whether native or imported at a remote period, has not been handed down to us. In point of fact, the chamfering of a simple stone pier into an octagon and then further to a polygon of sixteen, or more, sides (specimens of the two forms are seen side by side in two of the tombs of Beni Hassan) is so elementary an effort of architecture and one so obvious, that its independent and spontaneous adoption by two different nations would be matter for no surprise. On the other hand, it is to be remarked that these tombs and the early temple at Karnak already mentioned are the only instances of this style known in Africa--that not only are they isolated in themselves, but they form a step to no further developments--a link in no chain; that in character and conception they have nothing in common with any of the great monuments of Egypt, to which indeed they are antagonistic in feeling; that they stand side by side with other monuments of the _same_ date (about 2000 B.C.?) of a developed and absolutely different type--a type certainly indigenous and based on the imitation of natural forms which is especially characteristic of Egyptian architecture; and lastly, that the tombs of Beni Hassan show certain dissonances, such as one might expect to find in the case of an unintelligent and unperceptive manipulation of a foreign style. In the face of these considerations, I find it difficult to resist a suspicion that the view generally received exactly reverses the truth of the case, and that these tombs are not indeed the prototypes of the Doric temple, but rather the results, themselves, of contact at some remote period between the Egyptians and that branch of the great Aryan family which, at long intervals, and in successive waves, covered the shores of the Egean Sea, and one of the latest offshoots of which poured down into Greece from the heights of Thessaly under the name of Dorians. I believe the earliest Egyptian _record_ of the pressure of Greeks in this country goes no further back than 1500 B.C.; but a peaceful intercourse between the two races may have existed over a long period, without necessarily finding a place in public records.

The (quasi) Doric tombs are divided into a nave and aisles by two rows of piers, carrying an architrave and disposed at right angles to the portico, agreeably carrying out the likeness of a Greek temple. The circles which intersect the extremity of the other group of tombs are _parallel_ to the portico, and have a deplorable effect, much heightened by the shape of the ceiling, which is that of a very flat pediment. The architrave follows the line of the roof, but at a still more open angle. It would be difficult to conceive anything more hideous. Nearly all the tombs are decorated with frescoes of a rude kind, but displaying frequently an amount of freedom unusual in Egyptian art.

Our guide was a splendid fellow, looking, in his flowing robes, like a figure from the "School of Athens" on the "Disputa." The longer I live, the more I am struck by the identity of Raphael's frescoes with the noblest aspects of Nature.

To Benisoef in the evening. Passed some travellers; nothing looks so gay and pretty as a dahabieh with its colours flying and its sails spread.

_Saturday, 28th._--Lovely morning once again. Reached Sakkara early, but found that the road to the Pyramids was obstructed by water, so moved on at once to Ghizeh, opposite to Old Cairo, where I shall remain till to-morrow morning; meanwhile I have sent on Hosseyn to secure a room at the inn, and to fetch the means of leaving a pleasant memory of me on board the _Sheberkheyt_.

I have stripped the walls of my cabin of the paintings I had hung round them, and they look desolate and like the coffin of my now past journey. A most enjoyable journey it has been, full of pleasant things to remember; full, too, I hope, of artistic profit and teaching. I have been indeed fortunate, for, as I now see more clearly than ever, in a dahabieh I could not have achieved a third of the journey, and in a passenger steamer I could not have done a stroke of work. Every study I take home I owe entirely to the viceroy's munificent kindness.

_Sunday, 29th._--Left for Boulay, my destination--gave a parting sheep to the crew, distributed _largesse_, shook hands all round, and drove off to the hotel.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] See Chap. IV. p. 239.

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