thence to the Albert Lake and onwards to swell the torrent

of Father Nile.

Stanley writes: "Little did we imagine it, but the results of our journey from the Albert Nyanza to

where I turned away from the newly-discovered lake in 1876, established beyond a doubt that the snowy mountain, which bears the native name of Ruwenzori or Ruwenjura, is identical with what the ancients called 'Mountains of the Moon.'

"Note what Scheadeddin, an Arabian geographer of the Fifteenth Century writes: From the Mountains of the Moon the Egyptian Nile takes its rise. It cuts horizontally the equator in its course north. Many rivers come from this mountain and unite in a great lake. From this lake comes the Nile, the most beautiful and greatest of the rivers of all the earth.'"

A

THE NILE

ISAAC TAYLOR

FTER a few days at Cairo-one of the most amus

ing and picturesque cities in the world-the Express Nile Service of Messrs. Cook brings the traveller in three days to Luxor, where he will find enough to occupy him for as many weeks. The first view from the river shows the appositeness of the epithet Hecatompylos, applied to Thebes by Homer. Huge cubical masses of masonry-not the gateways of the city, which was never walled, but the pylons and propylons of the numerous temples are seen towering above the palms, and, separated from each other by miles of verdant plain, roughly indicate the limits of the ancient city.

At Luxor the Nile valley is about ten miles across. The escarpment of the desert plateau, which elsewhere forms a fringing cliff of nearly uniform elevation, here breaks into cone-shaped peaks rising to a height of seventeen hundred feet above the level plain, which in January is already waving with luxuriant crops the barley coming into ear, the lentils and vetches in flower and the tall sugar-canes beginning to turn yellow. The plain is dotted with Arab villages, each raised above the level of the inundation on its tell, or mound of ancient débris, and embosomed in a grove of date-palms mingled with the quaint dom-palms characteristic of the Thebiad. Animal life is far more abundant than in Italy or France. We note the camels and buffaloes feeding everywhere, tethered in the fields; the

great soaring kites floating in the air; the graceful hoopoos, which take the place of our English thrushes; the white paddy-birds fishing on the sand-banks of the river; gay king-fishers, among them the fish-tiger pied in black and white; the sun-bird, a bee-eater clad in a brilliant coat of green and gold; the crested lark, the greater and lesser owl, as well as water-wagtails, pipits, chats and warblers, numerous swifts and swallows, with an occasional vulture, eagle, cormorant, pelican, or crane. The jackal is common; and the wolf, the hyena, and the fox are not unfrequently heard, but seldom seen.

The sunsets on the Nile, if not the finest in the world, are unique in character. This is probably due to the excessive dryness of the atmosphere, and to the haze of impalpable dust arising from the fine mud deposited by the inundation. As the sun descends, he leaves a pathway or glowing gold reflected from the smooth surface of the Nile. Any faint streaks of cloud in the west shine out as the tenderest and most translucent bars of rose; a lurid reflection of the sunset lights up the eastern sky; then half an hour after sunset a great dome of glow arises in the west, lemon, changing into the deepest orange, and slowly dying away into a crimson fringe on the horizon-the glassy mirror of the Nile gleaming like molten metal; and then, as the last hues of sunset fade, the zodiacal light, a huge milky cone, shoots up into the sky.

On moonless nights the stars shine out with a brilliancy unknown in our misty northern latitudes. About three in the morning the strange marvel of the Southern Cross rises for an hour or two, the lowest star of the four appearing through a fortunate depression in the chain of hills. When the moon is nearly full, the visitors sally out into the tem

ples to enjoy in the clear, calm and balmy air the mystery of their dark recesses, enhanced by the brilliant illumination of the thickly clustered columns. It is a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten.

But the charm of Luxor does not consist mainly in its natural beauties, though these are not to be despised, but in its unrivalled historical interest. There is no other site of a great ancient city which takes you so far and so clearly back into the past. All the greater monuments of Thebes, all the chief tombs and temples, are older than the time of Moses; they bear in clearly readable cartouches on their sculptured walls the names of the great conquering kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties-Thotmes III., Amenhotep III., Seti I., and Rameses II.-who carried the victorious arms of Egypt to Ethiopia, Lybia, the Euphrates and the Orontes; the great wall-faces forming a picturegallery of their exploits. More modern names on the temple-walls of Thebes are those of Shishak, who vanquished Rehoboam, and Tirhakah, the contemporary of Hezekiah. The earliest name yet found at Thebes is that of Usertasen, a king of the twelfth dynasty, who lived some forty-three centuries ago; the latest considerable additions were made by the Ptolemies, and the record finally closes with a cartouche in which we spell out the hieroglyphic name of the Emperor Tiberius. But practically the monumental history of Thebes has ended before that of ancient Rome begins. The arches of Titus and Constantine, the mausoleum of Hadrian, Trajan's Column, the Colosseum and the Catacombs-in short, all the great structures of pre-Christian Rome-date from a time when Thebes had begun to be forsaken, and the ruin of her temples had commenced. Even the oldest Roman monuments, the Cloaca Maxima,

the Agger, and the substructures of the Palatine belong to a period when the greater edifices of Thebes were hoary with the dust of centuries. When Herodotus, the father of European history, voyaged up the Nile to Thebes, at a time when the Greeks had not even heard of an obscure Italian town which bore the name of Rome, the great temples which he saw, the vocal Memnon which is the statue of Amenhotep III., and the buildings which he ascribed to a king he called Sesostris, already belonged to an antiquity as venerable as that which separates the Heptarchy and the Anglo-Saxon Kings from the reign of Queen Victoria.

Difficult as it is to realize the antiquity of these monuments, in many of which the chiselling is as sharp and the colouring as brilliant as if they had been executed only yesterday, it is still more difficult by any description to convey an impression of their vastness. The temples and tombs are scattered over a space of many square miles; single ruins cover an area of several acres; thousands of square yards of wall contain only the pictured story of a single campaign. For splendour and magnitude the group of temples at Karnak, about two miles from Luxor, forms the most magnificent ruin in the world.