before the sun gets too hot, between breakfast and
luncheon to be precise, all the good ladies in cork helmets and blue
spectacles (dark-coloured spectacles are recommended on account of the
glare) spread themselves over these solitudes, domesticated as it were
to their use, with as much security as in Trafalgar Square or Kensington
Gardens. Not seldom even you may see one of them making her way alone,
book in hand, towards one of the picturesque rocks--No. 363, for
example, or No. 364, if you like it better--which seems to be
making signs to her with its white ticket, in a manner which, to the
uninitiated observer, might seem even a little improper.

But what a sense of safety families may feel here, to be sure! In spite
of the huge numbers, which at first sight look a little equivocal,
nothing in the least degree reprehensible can happen among these
granites; which are, moreover, in a single piece, without the least
crack or hole into which the straggler could contrive to crawl. No. The
figures and the crosses denote simple blocks of stones, covered with
hieroglyphics, and correspond to a chaste catalogue where each Pharaonic
inscription may be found translated in the most becoming language.

This ingenious ticketing of the stones of the desert is due to the
initiative of an English Egyptologist.

CHAPTER XX

THE PASSING OF PHILAE

Leaving Assouan--as soon as we have passed the last house--we come at
once upon the desert. And now the night is falling, a cold February
night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky.

Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos of granite and sand, its
warm tones and reddish colour. But there are telegraph poles and the
lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear in the
empty horizon. And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems
to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The most
commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on the
quay of Assouan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its aspects
of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use of the
tourists and the ladies.

First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand at the beginning of these
quasi-solitudes. Such old cemeteries of every epoch of history. The
thousand little cupolas of saints of Islam are crumbling side by side
with the Christian obelisks of the first centuries; and, underneath, the
Pharaonic hypogea. In the twilight, all these rui