the admirable Pharaonic Temple, its impudent
facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such thing, it will
readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure pitiably the whole of
the surroundings. The old Arab town, with its little white houses, its
minarets and its palm-trees, might as well not exist. The famous temple
and the forest of heavy Osiridean columns admire themselves in vain in
the waters of the river. It is the end of Luxor.

And what a crowd of people is here! While, on the contrary, the opposite
bank seems so absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of golden sand
and, on the horizon, its mountains of the colour of glowing embers,
which, as we know, are full of mummies.

Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of tourist boats, a sort of two or
three storeyed barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from Cairo to
the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the vibration of their dynamos make
an intolerable noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my dahabiya,
where the functionaries of Messrs. Cook will not come to disturb me?

We can now see nothing of the palaces of Thebes, whither I am to repair
in the evening. We are farther from them than we were last night. The
apparition during our morning's journey had slowly receded in the plains
flooded by sunlight. And then the Winter Palace and the new boats shut
out the view.

But this modern quay of Luxor, where I disembark at ten o'clock in the
morning in clear and radiant sunshine, is not without its amusing side.

In a line with the Winter Palace a number of stalls follow one another.
All those things with which our tourists are wont to array themselves
are on sale there: fans, fly flaps, helmets and blue spectacles. And,
in thousands, photographs of the ruins. And there too are the toys, the
souvenirs of the Soudan: old negro knives, panther-skins and gazelle
horns. Numbers of Indians even are come to this improvised fair,
bringing their stuffs from Rajputana and Cashmere. And, above all, there
are dealers in mummies, offering for sale mysteriously shaped coffins,
mummy-cloths, dead hands, gods, scarabaei--and the thousand and
one things that this old soil has yielded for centuries like an
inexhaustible mine.

Along the stalls, keeping in the shade of the houses and the scattered
palms, pass representatives of the plutocracy of the world. Dressed
by the same costumiers, bedecked in the same plumes, and with faces
reddened by the same sun, the milliona