One thing that has constantly impressed us here is the engineering operations which must have been necessary to handle such great masses of stone. Not only the pylons and the pillars, but also the great beams of the architraves are so massive that the blocks of which they are composed must have presented serious difficulties when they came to be lifted into position. We are asked to believe that most of them were raised on piles of earth, the latter constantly augmented as the building rose, and dug away when it was all complete.

Two such temples in a single day have given us all we can assimilate, even as an "orientation view," — and, by the way, speaking of orientation, I am reminded that it seems to have been a much less important matter with the followers of Ammon than it was with the Greeks, or than it is with the Mohammedans, who must pray toward Mecca to be thoroughly effective with Allah. That the Greek turned his temples toward the east, varying their axes only with the season at which the god's high festival was celebrated, was evidently for the purpose of illuminating the innermost recess of his shrines at sunrise. The Ammonite had no such consideration to bother him. He left openings to light the interior of his temples, sometimes providing them with stone grillwork, and allowed the temple to face in whichever

direction seemed most convenient. Luxor faces the north, and Karnak the west.

This evening we have been promenading on the bank watching the natives. From their midst there suddenly appeared a tall and lanky Arab who sought out the Professor and touched his arm.

"How you do, sah? You satisfy with boy Joseph ?" "Yes, indeed! Joseph nice boy! Are you Joseph's father?"

"Oh, no! I the father of Joseph's sister!"

Good heavens! This sounds a bit questionable. But in any case the Professor is well content with Joseph, and piously proposes to meet him on the other shore when we gather at the river in the morning.

1

CHAPTER XIII. THE WEST BANK AT

MAR

THEBES

ARCH 8. This has proved to be our most fatiguing, and at the same time the most thoroughly enjoyable day of our experiences in Upper Egypt. We have begun our acquaintance with the famous western bank of the river, and in particular have been exploring some of the royal tombs in the inclosed and barren valley that lies among the outthrust spurs of the Great Desert.

Because the season is already well advanced and the noonday sun sure to be hot, we got away very early. I have heard much of this journey to the Tombs of the Kings as being the most trying of the whole Nile tour, but apparently much depends on the weather. We were fortunate in having a fresh northerly breeze which made the day a delight. Dusty, indeed, was the road, and fairly long. Like

wise there were the inevitable flies. But the latter we have now come to regard as a matter of course, and the dust of our cavalcade is nothing to a sandstorm which latter we have been mercifully spared for many a day.

The western shore presented a splendid picture when we rose. It stretched away for several level miles, its sands interspersed with fields of green, until it reached the point where the desert cliffs rose in their mountainous majesty; and its foreground was bright and gay with a numerous company of natives, assembled to man the donkeys and sand-carts for the excursion. They presented a kaleidoscopic array of colors, even from a distance, grouped as they were in a long line just above the rim of the bank.

We were ferried over in detachments to the accompaniment of much "Illy-Haley" and "Soulless Alice." The current was swift, and we had to be tugged manfully a long distance up river in the slack waters of the Luxor shore before it was safe to put out into midstream—and even then our progress to the other bank was crabwise. Lazy feluccas swept past us floating with the racing current, whilst others, bound up river, were towed by chanting crews along the low western bank, straining their limbs to the sagging hawsers as they trod gingerly in the slushy sand.

Abd'allah, Joseph, and Hassan were dancing up and down on the top of the bank when we stepped ashore, crazy with anxiety lest we forget them. Their steeds were tethered to a long fence that recalled the horse-rail of an old-fashioned New England meetinghouse. There was an incessant bawling, a universal scrambling, a mighty tightening of girth-straps and adjustment of stirrups. Katrina, the Professor, and I leaped forthwith to the saddle and galloped all three- the muleteers tucking the ends of their flowing gowns into their mouths and scampering after. We headed northward.

For a space the road lay along a dike, which at the present low stage of the river is well inland across a broad stretch of beach. Along this we clattered in single file with but a wondering sidelong glance at the broad expanses of the plain, from the midst of which towered the distant colossi of Memnon and various half-hidden ruins. It must have been an imposing place in the day of it, for here lay the mortuary shrines of the greatest of the Imperial Pharaohs, no longer built hard-by their graves as in the days of old, but sagely separated from them by miles of rugged mountain, to the end that the shrine of the ka should no longer draw attention to the actual resting-place of the body with its much spoil and temptation to secret thievery. Of these temples