amers
are arriving, and throngs of donkey-boys and dragomans go down in
haste to meet them. Servants run to and fro on errands from the many
dahabiyehs. Bathers leap into the brown waters. The native craft pass by
with their enormous sails outspread to catch the wind, bearing serried
mobs of men, and black-robed women, and laughing, singing children. The
boatmen of the hotels sing monotonously as they lounge in the big, white
boats waiting for travellers to Medinet-Abu, to the Ramesseum, to Kurna,
and the tombs. And just above them rise the long lines of columns,
ancient, tranquil, and remote--infinitely remote, for all their
nearness, casting down upon the sunlit gaiety the long shadow of the
past.

From the edge of the mound where stands the native village the effect
of the temple is much less decorative, but its detailed grandeur can be
better grasped from there; for from there one sees the great towers of
the propylon, two rows of mighty columns, the red granite Obelisk of
Rameses the great, and the black granite statues of the king. On the
right of the entrance a giant stands, on the left one is seated, and a
little farther away a third emerges from the ground, which reaches to
its mighty breast.

And there the children play perpetually. And there the Egyptians sing
their serenades, making the pipes wail and striking the derabukkeh; and
there the women gossip and twitter like the birds. And the buffalo comes
to take his sun-bath; and the goats and the curly, brown sheep pass in
sprightly and calm processions. The obelisk there, like its brother in
Paris, presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a life that seems
akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches the simplicity of
this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the Nile with a calm that
one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic outrage, or by any
vision of too perpetual foreign life. For the tourists each year are but
an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the shadoof-man sings his ancient song,
violent and pathetic, bold as the burning sun-rays. Still the fellaheen
plough with the camel yoked with the ox. Still the women are covered
with protective amulets and hold their black draperies in their mouths.
The intimate life of the Nile remains the same. And that life obelisk
and king have known for how many, many years!

And so I love to think of this intimacy of life about the temple of the
happy dancers and the humble little wives, and it