A Thousand Miles Up the Nile

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A creaking sakkieh is at work yonder, turned by a couple of red cows with mild Hathor-like faces. The old man who drives them sits in the middle cog of the wheel, and slowly goes around as if he was being roasted." The old man who drives them sits in the middle of the cog-wheel, and goes slowly round as if he was being roasted. To go down into one of these great sepulchres is to descend one's-self into the Lower World, and to tread the path of the shades. Crossing the threshold, we look up — half-expecting to read those terrible words in which all who enter are warned to leave hope behind them. The passage slopes before our feet; the daylight fades behind us. At the end of the passage comes a flight of steps, and from the bottom of that flight of steps we see another corridor slanting down into depths of utter darkness. The walls on both sides are covered with close-cut columns of hieroglyphic text, interspersed with ominous shapes, half-deity, half-demon. Huge serpents writhe beside us along the walls. Guardian spirits of threatening aspect advance, brandishing swords of flame. A strange heaven opens overhead — a heaven where the stars travel in boats across the seas of space; and the Sun, escorted by the hours, the months, We now thought the service was over; but there remained four wee, crumpled, brown mites of babies to be christened. These small Copts were carried up the church by four acolytes, followed by four anxious fathers. The priest then muttered a short prayer; crossed the babies with water from the basin in which he had washed his hands; drank the water; wiped the basin out with a piece of bread; ate the bread; and dismissed the little newly-made Christians with a hasty blessing. willingly have added a double pipe or a cocoa-nut fiddle 1 to the strength of the band, but none of our

the confederate princes of Asia Minor then lying in ambush near Kadesh; 15 and it was hither that he returned in The most interesting part of this book to me was when she arrived at Aswan. Edwards described the old city harbor and old Souq meticulously, and she could simply draw in the readers' minds how the people were wearing and dealing with tourists in that time. Also, the decorative depiction of the second oldest hotel in Aswan, the Grand Hotel. Below these "hareem" groups come colossal bas-reliefs of a religious and military character. The King, as usual, smites his prisoners in presence of the Gods. A slender and spirited figure in act to slay, the fiery hero strides across the wall "like Baal 16 descended from the heights of heaven. His limbs are endued with the force of victory. With his right hand he seizes the multitudes; his left reaches like an arrow after those who fly before him. His sword is sharp as that of his father Mentu." 17 of dark granite, overturned and but little injured; the second, shattered by early treasure-seekers.

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was titular king, in the hereditary sense, from his birth 25 and during the lifetime of his father, is Natuurlijk is Edwards een dame van haar tijd. Bij de armoede van de bevolking of de bemanning staat ze niet erg stil. Wel lijkt de positie van de iets beter gesitueerde vrouwen haar afschuwelijk, die zitten alleen maar binnen en vervelen zich dood, terwijl Edwards zelf al die schatten ziet, en onverschrokken stikdonkere graftombes betreedt, of de piramides beklimt (dat mocht toen nog gewoon). Edwards is ontzaglijk belezen en bereisd, en ze maakt prachtige tekeningen bij haar minutieuze en sfeervolle verslagen. Smakelijk vertelt ze over de reisavonturen, gedegen doet ze verslag van alle bezienswaardigheden. Ramessides at Silsilis are depicted in their proper persons. In one tableau, Rameses I, defunct, deified, 23 swathed, enshrined, and crowned like Osiris, is worshipped by Seti I. Behind Seti stands his Queen Tuaa, the mother of Rameses II. Elsewhere Seti I, being now dead, is deified and worshipped by Rameses II, who pours a libation to his father's statue. Through all these handsome heads there runs a striking family likeness. All more or less partake of that Dantesque type which characterises the portraits of Rameses II in his youth. The features of Rameses I and Seti I are somewhat pinched and stern, like the Dante of elder days. The delicate profile of Queen Tuaa, which is curiously like some portraits of Queen Elizabeth, is perhaps too angular to be altogether pleasing. But in the well-known face of Rameses II these harsher details vanish and the beauty of the race culminates. The artists of Egyptian Renaissance, always great in profile-portraiture, are nowhere seen to better advantage than in this interesting series. The author was a bit different for her time, so her take on traveling in Egypt is fascinating. At times she is forward-thinking and other times buys into the thinking of her class at the time. I laughed out loud at a passage where she embraces the then-recent deciphering of hieroglyphics. She compares people who still think they can't be translated to people who think the earth is flat. Go with science is her thought. Brilliant. Would love to know what she would make of modern-day flat-earthers. Much harder to get past was her whole assertion that the British take things for their museums for study and preservation, that the French take things for their museums only for glory, and Arabs just steal things for profit. There's an idea that hasn't aged well.

To describe it, in the sense of building up a recognizable image by means of words, is impossible. The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one's own dumbness, and littleness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing. It is a place that strikes you into silence; that empties you, as it were, not only of words but ideas." the deceased upon earth, and in others of the adventures of his soul after death. Here at stated seasons the survivors repaired with offerings. No priest, it would seem, of necessity officiated at these little services. A whole family would come, bringing the first fruits of their garden, the best of their poultry, cakes of home-made bread, bouquets of lotus blossoms. With their own hands they piled the altar; and the eldest son, as representative of the rest, burned the incense and poured the libations. It is a scene constantly reproduced upon monuments 24 of every epoch. These votive oratories, however, are wholly absent in the valley of Bab-el-Molûk. The royal tombs consist of only tunnelled passages and sepulchral vaults; the entrances to which were closed for ever as soon as the sarcophagus was occupied; hence it may be concluded that each memorial temple played to the tomb of its tutelary saint and sovereign that part which is played by the external oratory attached to the tomb of a private individual. Nor must it be forgotten that as early as the time of the Pyramid Kings, there was a votive chapel attached to every pyramid, the remains of which are traceable in almost every instance, on the east side. There were also priests of the pyramids, as we learn from innumerable funerary inscriptions.Now, Rameses the Great, if he was as much like his portraits as his portraits are like each other, must have been one of the handsomest men, not only of his day, but of all history. Wheresoever we meet with him, whether in the fallen colossus at Memphis, or in the syenite torso of the British Museum, or among the innumerable bas-reliefs of Thebes, Abydos, Gournah, and Bayt-el-Welly, his features (though bearing in some instances the impress of youth and in others of maturity) are always the same. The face is oval; the eyes are long, prominent, and heavy-lidded; the nose is slightly aquiline and characteristically depressed at the tip; the nostrils are open and sensitive; the under lip projects; the chin is short and square. A really fun travel book; that is, fun to read while travelling, even if one is not sailing up the Nile. I find it harder to complain about modern travel, for one thing.

makes little impression on the native mind. No one now remembers Champollion, or Rosellini, or Sir G. Wilkinson; but every Arab in Luxor cherishes the memory of Lady Duff Gordon in his heart of hearts, and speaks of her with blessings. at the top of the leaf in pure cobalt, and passes imperceptibly down to a tint that is almost emerald green at the bottom. 19 We now leave behind us the well, and the trees, and the old Greek-looking Temple, and turn our faces westward, bound for an opening yonder among cliffs pitted with the mouths of empty tombs. It is plain to see that we are now entering upon what was once a torrent-bed. Rushing down from the hills, the pent-up waters have here spread fan-like over the slope of the desert, strewing the ground with boulders, and ploughing it into hundreds of tortuous channels. Up that torrent-bed lies our road to-day.By and by came the Governor, the Kadî of Luxor, the Prussian Consul and his son, and some three or four grave-looking merchants in rich silk robes and ample turbans. Meanwhile the band — two fiddles, a tambourine, and a darabukkeh — played at intervals at the lower end of the hall; pipes, The wall-sculptures at Gournah are extremely beautiful, especially those erected by Seti I. Where it has been accidentally preserved, the surface is as smooth, the execution as brilliant, as the finest mediæval ivory carving. Behind a broken column, for instance, that leans against the south west wall of the sanctuary, 26 one may see, by peeping this way and that, the ram's-head prow of a sacred boat, quite unharmed, and of surpassing delicacy. The modelling of the ram's head is simply faultless. It would indeed be scarcely too much to say that this one fragment, if all the rest had perished, would alone place the decorative sculpture of ancient Egypt in a rank second only to that of Greece. and Rosellini lived and worked together, during part of their long sojourn at Thebes. Rosellini tells how they used to sit up at night, dividing the fruits of the day's labour;