y your day be happy!"

Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of all the gifts of the gods, as
those who wore the lotus-blossom amulet believed thousands of years ago,
and Denderah, appropriately, is a very young Egyptian temple,
probably, indeed, the youngest of all the temples on the Nile. Its
youthfulness--it is only about two thousand years of age--identifies it
happily with the happiness and beauty of its presiding deity, and as I
rode toward it on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the morning,
I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred Persea-tree. When
Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of the Persea-tree the name of king or
conqueror, he gained everlasting life. Was it the life of youth? An
everlasting life of middle age might be a doubtful benefit. And then
mentally I added, "unless one lived in Egypt." For here the years drop
from one, and every golden hour brings to one surely another drop of
the wondrous essence that sets time at defiance and charms sad thoughts
away.

Unlike White Abydos, White Denderah stands apart from habitations, in
a still solitude upon a blackened mound. From far off I saw the facade,
large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as complete as that of
Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of the plain of brown, alluvial soil
that was broken here and there by a sharp green of growing things. There
was something of sadness in the scene, and again I thought of Hathor as
the "Lady of the Underworld," some deep-eyed being, with a pale brow,
hair like the night, and yearning, wistful hands stretched out in
supplication. There was a hush upon this place. The loud and vehement
cry of the shadoof-man died away. The sakieh droned in my ears no more
like distant Sicilian pipes playing at Natale. I felt a breath from the
desert. And, indeed, the desert was near--that realistic desert which
suggests to the traveller approaches to the sea, so that beyond each
pallid dune, as he draws near it, he half expects to hear the lapping of
the waves. Presently, when, having ascended that marvellous staircase
of the New Year, walking in procession with the priests upon its walls
toward the rays of Ra, I came out upon the temple roof, and looked upon
the desert--upon sheeny sands, almost like slopes of satin shining
in the sun, upon paler sands in the distance, holding an Arab _campo
santo_, in which rose the little creamy cupolas of a sheikh's tomb,
surrounded by a creamy wall, those little cupolas gave