of the Memnonium, but grand and solemn, and majestic inconceivably.

Through the vast vistas the eye can not steal out to the horizon, or catch gladly the waving of green boughs. Only above, through the open spaces of the architrave, it sees the cloudless sky, and the ear hears the singing of unseen birds.

"Is it not strange, I never saw the sun?" So seems the song of birds never to have been heard until its sweetness was contrasted with the sublime, solemn silence of Karnak.

Here, could you choose of all men your companion, you would call Michel Angelo, and then step out and leave him alone. For it is easy to summon spirits, but hard to keep them company. And a man could better bear the imposing majesty of Karnak, than the searching sadness of the artist's eye. In the valley of the Nile, Michel Angelo would have felt that great artists unknown, saw with their eyes in their way, the form of the grandeur he sought. In Memnon, in the great hall of Karnak, distorted as through clouds and mists, yet not all unshaped, he would have seen that an ideal as grand was worshiped, nor have grieved that it was called by another name. His eye, too, would have wandered delighted over the mingled sweetness and severity of the Egyptian landscape, vast and silent, and sun-steeped as the inner realm in which he lived.

Failing Michel Angelo, there were other figures in the hall. Sundry vailed specters were sketching the unsketchable. Plaid pantaloons and turbaned wide-awakes flitted

N*

among the figures of gods and heroes. I saw a man with a callotype investing Karnak. Nimrod has mounted— tally-ho!

Nor fear a jest in Karnak, nor suppose a ringing laugh can destroy this silence. We speak, and the stillness ripples around the sound, and swallows it as tracelessly as mid ocean a stone. Nor because Karnak is solemn, suppose that we must be sentimental. The Howadji sat upon a sloping stone, and eat sardine sandwiches, desserting with dates and the chibouque, and the holy of holies was not less holy, nor the grandeur less grand.

In the afternoon we wandered over the whole wilderness of ruin, studying the sculptures, deciphering the cartouches, stumbling and sliding in the sand down to temples whose colored architraves showed level with the ground, so deeply were they buried. For travel and opportunity have their duties. But we returned to the great hall, as thought always will return to it, from grubbing in the wondrous waste of Egypt, and at sunset ascended the great pylon and looked across the river westward, to the Libyan suburb.

The Howadji returned the next day to Karnak, and the next. A golden sunset streamed through it as they were finally departing. In the tenderness of its serene beauty, Karnak became beautiful, too. The colors upon the architraves and columns shone more deeply, and a rainbow-radiance permeated the solemn hall. Nimrod was coursing through the Libyan suburb. Glowingly golden ranged the level grain, rank on rank, to the river. The

How

birds gushed with their swift, sweet, sunset songs. young, how shadowy were we, in that austere antiquity! Was it compassion that unbent its awful gravity?

No, gadfly! stinging my perpendicular trotting insensibility. Souls like ours conceived, hands like ours fashioned, this awful Karnak. Never succumb to Karnak, gadfly! Man shaped the desert into this divinity. Pygmalion carved the statue that smote his soul with love.

XLIV.

Pruning.

A SACRIFICIAL sheep stood in the starlight on the shore at Luxor. The golden-sleeved Commander was profoundly religious, and proposed to hold a sacred feast of sheep— "a swarry of biled mutton," as later poets have itupon his return to Cairo. The victim was put below, the crew rose from squatting on the shore and came aboard, and with plaintive songs and beating oars we drifted down the river once more, and watched the dim Theban mountains melt slowly away into invisibility.

You fancy the Nile voyage is a luxury of languid repose-a tropical trance. There the warm winds lave groves forever green, of which, shivering in our wintry palaces, we dream. Stealing swiftly over the Mediterranean, you would, swallow-like, follow the summer, and shuffling off the coil of care at Cairo, would southward sail to the Equator, happiness, and Mountains of the Moon.

Well, single days are that delight, and to me, the whole voyage, but possibly not to you. A diamond-decked damsel is not a single jewel, although haply to the distant eye she brilliantly blaze like a star. Therefore to the distance

of hope and memory will the Nile wear its best hue. Nor will we quarrel. To hope, all things are forgiven. Let us pardon memory that it remembers like a lover.

It is hard to believe in winds under a cloudless sky, or to feel chilly when the sun shines brightly. The mind can not readily separate the climate from the character of the land. We never fancy gales in churchyards, only sad twilight breaths, and Egypt being a tomb, to imagination, how should there be windy weather?

A tomb-but a temple. From the minareted mosques of Cairo you descend into it, and well believe that the back door opens into heaven. The river is its broad, winding avenue. The glaring mountains its walls, the serene sky its dome. On either hand as you advance is the way sculptured with green grain and palms of peace, as in those Theban tombs. And more splendid are the niches of the dead here, than the palaces of the livingKarnak, the Memnonium, Kum Ombos, Aboo Simbel. Ghosts are their tenants now-Champollion, Lepsius, and Sir Gardiner the tireless Old Mortalities that chisel their fading characters.

Here are enough buried to populate the world. The priests told Herodotus a succession of more than three hundred kings. The thought bores antiquity like an Artesian well. The Howadji looks upon Ramses as a modern, and grudges him that name of great. He appears everywhere. From the pyramids to Aboo Simbel, in all the best places of the best remains, his cartouche is carved. Why was he great? What do we know, who call him so, but