e who has
seen that toothless, sinister wreck, who had already attained the age
of nearly a hundred years before death delivered him to the embalmers of
Thebes, will find it difficult to believe that he could ever have been
young, and worn his hair curled so; that he could ever have played and
been a child.

*****

We thought we had finished with the Cooks and Cookesses of the luncheon.
But alas! our horses, faster than their donkeys, overtake them in the
return journey amongst the green cornfields of Abydos; and in a stoppage
in the narrow roadway, caused by a meeting with a number of camels laden
with lucerne, we are brought to a halt in their midst. Almost touching
me is a dear little white donkey, who looks at me pensively and in such
a way that we at once understand each other. A mutual sympathy unites
us. A Cookess in spectacles surmounts him--the most hideous of them
all, bony and severe. Over her travelling costume, already sufficiently
repulsive, she wears a tennis jersey, which accentuates the angularity
of her figure, and in her person she seems the very incarnation of the
respectability of the British Isles. It would be more equitable, too--so
long are those legs of hers, which, to be sure, have scant interest for
the tourist--if she carried the donkey.

The poor little white thing regards me with melancholy. His ears twitch
restlessly and his beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of everything,
say to me as plain as words:

"She is a beauty, isn't she?"

"She is, indeed, my poor little donkey. But think of this: fixed on thy
back as she is, thou hast this advantage over me--thou seest her not!"

But my reflection, though judicious enough, does not console him, and
his look answers me that he would be much prouder if he carried, like so
many of his comrades, a simple pack of sugarcanes.

CHAPTER XI

THE DOWNFALL OF THE NILE

Some thousands of years ago, at the beginning of our geological period,
when the continents had taken, in the last great upheaval, almost the
forms by which we now know them, and when the rivers began to trace
their hesitating courses, it happened that the rains of a whole
watershed of Africa were precipitated in one formidable torrent across
the uninhabitable region which stretches from the Atlantic to the
Indian Ocean, and is called the region of the deserts. And this enormous
waterway, lost as it was in the sands, by-and-by regulated its course:
it became the Nile, and