in
savage lands in that far-off time, and realize that explorers dealt with
the natives in foreign countries in those days very much as they deal
with them now. When our explorers of to-day come back from their
journeys, they generally tell the story of their adventures in a big
book with many pictures; but no explorer ever published the account of a
voyage of discovery on such a scale as did Queen Hatshepsut, when she
carved the voyage to Punt on the walls of her great temple at
Deir-el-Bahri, and no pictures in any modern book are likely to last as
long, or to tell so much as these pictures that have come to light again
during the last few years, after being buried for centuries under the
desert sands.

[Illustration: PLATE 13.
THE BARK OF THE MOON, GUARDED BY THE DIVINE EYES.]

Queen Hatshepsut has left other memorials of her greatness besides the
temple with its story of her voyage. She has told us how one day she was
sitting in her palace, and thinking of her Creator, when the thought
came into her mind to rear two great obelisks before the Temple of Amen
at Karnak. So she gave the command, and Sen-mut, her clever architect,
went up the Nile to Aswan, and quarried two huge granite blocks, and
floated them down the river. Cleopatra's Needle, which stands on the
Thames Embankment, is 68-1/2 feet high, and it seems to us a huge stone
for men to handle. Our own engineers had trouble enough in bringing it
to this country, and setting it up. But these two great obelisks of
Queen Hatshepsut were 98-1/2 feet high, and weighed about 350 tons
apiece. Yet Sen-mut had them quarried, and set up, and carved all over
from base to summit in seven months from the time when the Queen gave
her command! One of them still stands at Karnak, the tallest obelisk in
the temple there; while the other great shaft has fallen, and lies
broken, close to its companion. They tell us their own plain story of
the wisdom and skill of those far-off days; and perhaps the great Queen
who thought of her Creator as she sat in her palace, and longed to
honour Him, found that the God whom she ignorantly worshipped was indeed
not far from His servant's heart.

CHAPTER XI

EGYPTIAN BOOKS

The Egyptians were, if not quite the earliest, at least among the
earliest of all the peoples of the world to find out how to put down
their thoughts in writing, or in other words, to make a book; and one of
their old books, full of wise advice from a father