gypt again, if I
were not afraid. I answered that it had not been a very lucky
place for us, but that personally I was not in the least afraid
and longed to return there. For as you know, I have, or think I
have, ties with Egypt and indeed with all Africa. Well, we went
and had a very happy time, although I was always expecting to see
old Harut come round the corner.

"After this it became a custom with us who, since George
practically gave up shooting and attending the House of Lords, had
nothing to keep us in England, to winter in Egypt. We did this for
five years in succession, living in a bungalow which we built at a
place in the desert, not far from the banks of the Nile, about
half way between Luxor which was the ancient Thebes, and Assouan.
George took a great fancy to this spot when first he saw it, and
so in truth did I, for, like Memphis, it attracted me so much that
I used to laugh and say I believed that once I had something to do
with it.

"Now near to our villa that we called 'Ragnall' after this house,
are the remains of a temple which were almost buried in the sand.
This temple George obtained permission to excavate. It proved to
be a long and costly business, but as he did not mind spending the
money, that was no obstacle. For four winters we worked at it,
employing several hundred men. As we went on we discovered that
although not one of the largest, the temple, owing to its having
been buried by the sand during, or shortly after the Roman epoch,
remained much more perfect than we had expected, because the early
Christians had never got at it with their chisels and hammers.
Before long I hope to show you pictures and photographs of the
various courts, etc., so I will not attempt to describe them now.

"It is a temple to Isis--built, or rather rebuilt over the remains
of an older temple on a site that seems to have been called Amada,
at any rate in the later days, and so named after a city in Nubia,
apparently by one of the Amen-hetep Pharaohs who had conquered it.
Its style is beautiful, being of the best period of the Egyptian
Renaissance under the last native dynasties.

"At the beginning of the fifth winter, at length we approached the
sanctuary, a difficult business because of the retaining walls
that had to be built to keep the sand from flowing down as fast as
it was removed, and the great quantities of stuff that must b