am, nor of the vast sheet of water glowing in the midday sun,
nor of the mountains honeycombed with tombs and quarries, at the foot of
which he would be sailing day after day. What interested him above all
things was information with regard to the sources of the immense river
itself, and the reasons for its periodic inundation, and, according to
the mental attitude impressed on him by his education, he accepted the
mythological solution offered by the natives, or he sought for a more
natural one in the physical lore of his own _savants_: thus he was told
that the Nile took its rise at Elephantine, between the two rocks called
Krophi and Mophi, and in showing them to him his informant would add
that Psammetichus I. had attempted to sound the depth of the river at
this point, but had failed to fathom it. At the few places where the
pilot of the barque put in to port, the population showed themselves
unfriendly, and refused to hold any communication with the Greeks.

[Illustration: 363.jpg the mountains honeycombed with tombs AND
Quarries]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Gautier.

The interpreters, who were almost all natives of the Delta, were not
always familiar with the people and customs of the Said, and felt almost
as completely foreign at Thebes as did their employers. Their office
was confined to translating the information furnished by the inhabitants
when the latter were sufficiently civilised to hold communication with
the travellers. What most astonished Herodotus at Panopolis was the
temple and the games held in honour, so he believed, of Perseus, the son
of Danae. These exercises terminated in an attempt to climb a regular
"greasy pole" fixed in the ground, and strengthened right and left by
three rows of stays attached to the mast at different heights; as for
Perseus, he was the ithyphallic god of the locality, Minu himself, one
of whose epithets--Pehresu, the runner--was confounded by the Greek ear
with the name of the hero. The dragomans, enlarging on this mistaken
identity, imagined that the town was the birthplace of Danaos and
Lyncseus; that Perseus, returning from Libya with the head of Medusa,
had gone out of his way to visit the cradle of his family, and that he
had instituted the games in remembrance of his stay there. Thebes had
become the ghost of its former self; the Persian governors had neglected
the city, and its princesses and their ministers were so impoverished
that they were