also did the odours of garlic, the uncleanliness, and the
flies in their myriads.

Time passed pleasantly in Assuan, though at length Mac thought they had
about exhausted most of its possibilities. There were mosques, temples
and bazaars; there was a wild race of desert Bisharin, whose living was
precarious in those days of war, since they had existed by dancing
weird, wild dances for the enlightenment of tourists; there was a
museum, rather a mouldy place like their kind, where were relics of
ages untold, and, much to Mac's amusement, a mummified sheep. He
thought the New Zealand method of freezing much more practicable.

At length, one morning, ere the mist wraiths had vanished, they crawled
slowly southwards across the rich golden sand of the lower Sudanese
desert. It was pleasantly bracing and clear in the early desert
morning, and Mac felt light-hearted and happy, as he gazed across the
distant featureless dunes of sand. Successfully accomplishing a
non-stop run of twenty miles in an hour and a half, they arrived at
Shellal, a village of a few mud huts and a station, a jetty with a
steamer or two, which took travellers farther to the south, to Wadi
Haifa and Khartoum. About the place itself there was little of
interest; it was a one-horse show with a few Arabs, Bedouins and
Sudanese, many flea-bitten mongrels and clouds of flies. But this
island-studded expanse of water was the great Assuan Dam. The gates
had been closed at this season for about a month, and the rising tide
had just reached the floor of the beautiful Temple of Isis, which
stood, half a mile away, perfectly reflected in the calm waters. They
wheezed away over to it in a steam pinnace, got temporarily snagged on
the top of a stray pillar, and eventually disembarked from their
hissing, modern contraption at the very portals, where oft times
Cleopatra and her suite were wont to enter from their state barges.
Mac's rather hazy notions of that lady wrapped her in a halo of
romance, and now he walked the lovely aisles which she had trod. Was
it, he thought, worth while gradually to spoil this wonderful building
for the sake of lucre from twentieth century Egypt?

From the old they went to the new, landing at the eastern end of the
great granite wall that bars the Nile at the head of the foaming first
cataract. Natives pushed them in trollies along the top of the mile
wall. Water roared in great white jets through the sluices, tempering
the b