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been everywhere and speaks half a dozen languages fluently. In addition to this he sketches in water colours, plays the fiddle, and breaks in horses! You have to travel to come across people like that! Here he is nothing so out of the way--every dragoman is able to talk in three languages at least. Doesn't it spur you on to feel how much we have to learn and how ignorant we are in our stay-at-home villages? All the morning we sit about and watch the graceful white-sailed boats coming down with cargoes of every kind. Sometimes we see them stranded on a hidden sandbank with the crew making frantic efforts to get them off again. We see the reaches lying ahead glittering like jewels in the sun, and then we land and ride a short way to a temple, under the care of the dragoman of the boat. The most moving thing in all that temple is a set of scenes of a hippopotamus hunt shown with great spirit; the poor little hippo looks more like a pig when he is at the bottom of the water with a spear or harpoon sticking in him, but when they haul him up by means of a noose round one leg the ancient artist represents him becoming bigger and bigger as he comes to the surface! The walls are, besides, covered with all the usual scenes of the king making offerings to the gods, and overriding his enemies, and doing all those noble things which kings wanted their posterity to know about them. A high-pitched voice, speaking in a hyper-refined affected tone, breaks in on our enjoyment; it belongs to one of the English people from the boat, a lady who evidently considers it her mission in life to instruct people; information flows from her ten finger-tips, she cannot help it, she was born to be a schoolmistress certainly. "That is the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt," she says, "that the king is wearing; sometimes you see him with one and sometimes with the other, here he has both together." As this is about the first thing a dragoman tells anyone in the first temple he sees, and as it is repeated at least once at every temple afterwards, only an idiot could fail to know it. We murmur something politely and turn away. Round a corner we stop to admire the rich colour still left in the ceiling, where a heavenly blue, covered with golden stars, represents the sky. "When we were here three years ago," says the lady at our elbows, "they had not uncovered those pillars, but we are told--that----" The peace and beauty are spoilt! Again we mu
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