and ride along a
path a few feet wide, with no fence of any kind and a drop of some
hundreds of feet on one side, we are devoutly thankful that the German
girl and the stout lady went round the other and longer way by the
valley!

Over the summit the donkeys are set free to get down the steep descent
as best they may, and they are as sure-footed as goats, but we who
follow find considerable difficulty as the loose stone and sand fall
away in miniature avalanches from beneath our slipping feet and we get
very hot. We are sheltered here from that fresh wind which is such a joy
in Egypt, the sun is at its height, and we have done a good morning's
work already after an early start. There, far below, looking like a
doll's house, is the rest-house where we lunch, and beside it two of the
men of the Mounted Police Camel Corps in khaki on their long-legged
beasts.

Whew! That last bit was tough! I am glad to get a long drink and equally
glad to go on after it to an excellent cold lunch which has been brought
to meet us. Hard-boiled eggs, salad, cold meat and fruit! We try them
all and then rest on the verandah looking at the towering orange cliffs
which hem us in. They seem to hang right over that little temple near,
to which we shall presently pay a visit. That is the temple of Der El
Bahari and was built by Hatshepset, the greatest of Egyptian queens.
Hatshepset was the daughter of one king and the wife of another, and
after her husband's death she ruled for about sixteen years. She made
expeditions to the Red Sea and acted in every way like a man. In the
drawings of her on the temple wall she is represented as a man and is
dressed in man's clothes. When her son-in-law, Thothmes III., who had
married her daughter, succeeded her, he scratched out her name wherever
he found it and chiselled out the pictures of her. He had evidently had
a bad time while she lived, but he must have been a small-minded and
spiteful man to take that petty revenge after her death!

[Illustration: A SOLEMN GIRL-CHILD.]

On the way home across the dhurra fields I see you stop riding suddenly
and stare intently down at something on the ground. I think at first it
is a scorpion you have found on the patch of light-coloured sand, but it
is only an immense black beetle, with a strong horny skin and a horn or
trumpet-shaped excrescence on the front part of its head. He belongs to
the scarabaeus, or dung-beetles, and big fellows they are; this one would