than all, everlasting convolutions of serpents in every possible form and attitude; human-legged, human-headed, crowned, entwining mummies enwreathing or embraced by processions, - extending down whole galleries, so that meeting the head of the serpent at the top of a staircase, you have to descend to its very end before you reach his tail. At last you arrive at the close of all-the vaulted hall, in the centre of which lies the immense granite sarcophagus, which ought to contain the body of the King. Here the procession's above, below, and around, reach their highest pitch-meandering round and round-white and black, and red and blue-legs and arms and wings spreading in enormous forms over the ceiling; and below lies, as I have said, the coffin itself.

It seems certain that all this gorgeous decoration was, on the burial of the King, immediately closed, and meant to be closed for ever; so that what we now see was intended never to be seen by any mortal eyes except those of the King himself when he awoke from his slumbers. Not only was the entrance closed, but in some cases-chiefly in that of the great sepulchre of Osirei-the passages were cut in the most devious directions, the approaches to them so walled up as to give the appearance of a termination long before you arrived at the actual chamber, lest by any chance the body of the King might be disturbed. And yet in spite of all these precautions, when these gigantic fortresses have been broken through, in no instance has the mummy been discovered. . . . .

Amongst the inscriptions of early travellers is one of peculiar interest. It was the "torch-bearer of the Eleusinian mysteries," who records that he visited these tombs "many years after the divine Plato "-thanks "to the gods and to the most pious Emperor Constantine who afforded him this favour." It is written in the vacant space under the figure of a wicked soul returning from the presence of Osiris in the form of a pig, which probably arrested the attention of the Athenian by reminding him of his own mysteries. Such a confluence of religions-of various religious associationscould hardly be elsewhere found; a Greek priest philosopher recording his admiration of the Egyptian worship in the time of Constantine, on the eve of the abolition of both Greek and Egyptian religion by Christianity. . . . .

It was on the evening of our last day that we climbed the steep side of that grand and mysterious valley, and from the top of the ridge had the last view of the valley itself, as we looked back upon it, and of the glorious plain of Thebes as we looked forward over it.

No distant prospect of the ruins can ever do them justice; but it was a noble point from which to see once more the dim masses of stone rising here and there out of the rich green, and to know

that this was Karnac with its gateways, and that Luxor with its long colonnade, and those nearer fragments the Rameseum and MedinetHabou; and further, the wide green depression in the soil, once the funereal lake.

Immediately below lay the Valley of Assasif, where in a deep recess under towering crags, like those of Delphi, lay the tombs of the priests and princes. The largest of these, in extent the largest of any, is that of Petumenap, Chief Priest in the reign of Pharaoh Necho. Its winding galleries are covered with hieroglyphics, as if hung with tapestry. The only figures which it contains are those which appear again and again in these priestly tombs, the touching effigies of himself and his wife-the best image that can be carried away of Joseph and Asenath-sitting side by side, their arms affectionately and solemnly entwined round each other's necks. . . . To have seen the Tombs of Thebes is to have seen the Egyptians as they lived and moved before the eyes of Moses-is to have seen the utmost display of funereal grandeur which has ever possessed the human mind. To have seen the Royal Tombs is more than this— it is to have seen the whole religion of Egypt unfolded as it appeared to the greatest powers of Egypt, at the most solemn moments of their lives. And this can be explored only on the spot. Only a very small portion of the mythological pictures of the Tombs of the Kings has ever been represented in engravings. The mythology of Egypt, even now, strange to say, can be studied only in the caverns of the Valley of the Kings.

9. NILE AT SILSILIS.

At Silsilis, the seat of the ancient sandstone quarries, there was a scene which stood alone in the voyage. The two ranges, here of red sandstone, closed in upon the Nile, like the Drachenfels and Rolandseck; fantastic rockery, deep sand-drifts, tombs and temples hewn out of the stone, the cultivated land literally reduced to a few feet or patches of rush and grass. It was curious to reflect, that those patches of green were for the time the whole of the Land of Egypt, we ourselves, as we swept by in our boat, the whole living population contained within its eastern and western boundaries. It soon opened again, wide plains appearing on each side.

10. NILE AT THE FIRST CATARACT.

And now the narrow limits of the sandstone range, which had succeeded to our old friends of limestone, and from which were dug the materials of almost all the temples of Egypt, are exchanged at Assouan-the old Syene-for the granite range; the Syenite granite, from which the Nile issues out of the mountains of Nubia.

For the first time a serrated mass of hills ran, not as heretofore along the banks, but across the southern horizon itself. The broad stream of the river, too, was broken up, not as heretofore by flat sandbanks, but by fantastic masses of black porphyry and granite, and by high rocky islands, towering high above the shores; strewn, far into the eastern Desert, far up the course of the Nile itself.

These are the rocks which make, and are made by, the Cataract, -well so called, the rapid which "breaks down" a course for itself through the fragments of granite crags. These, too, furnish the quarries from whence came the great colossal statues of Rameses, and all the obelisks. From this wild and distant region sprang all those familiar forms which we know so well in the squares of Rome. In the quarries which are still visible in the white sands and black crags immediately east of Assouan, one obelisk still remains, hewn out, but never removed from his original birthplace; the latest, as that of Heliopolis is the earliest born of the race. And not only are these rocks the quarries of the statues, but it is hardly possible to look at their forms and not believe that they suggested the idea. Islands, quarries, crags, along the river-side, all seem either like grotesque colossal figures, sitting with their grim features carved out against the sky, their vast limbs often smoothed by the inundations of successive ages; or else like the same statues broken to shivers, like that we saw at Thebes. One can quite imagine how, in the days when power was will and will was power, Rameses, returning from his Ethiopian conquests, should say, "Here is the stone, hard and glittering, from which my statue shall be hewn, and here is the model after which it shall be fashioned."

This is the utmost limit of the journey of Herodotus. He had been told a strange story, which he says he could not believe, by the Treasurer at Sais, that at this point of the river there were two mountains running up into sharp peaks, and called Crophi and Mophi, between which were the sources of the Nile, from which it ran down northwards, on one side, into Egypt, and southwards, on the other, into Ethiopia. He came, he says, to verify it, and observes (doubtless with truth), that by those deep, unfathomable sources which they described, they meant the violent eddies of the Cataracts.

To an inhabitant of Lower Egypt, the sight or the report of such a convulsion as the rapids make in the face of their calm and majestic river, must have seemed like the very beginning of his existence, the struggling into life of what afterwards became so gentle and beneficent. And if they heard that there was a river Nile further south, it was then natural for them to think that this could not be the same as their own. The granite range of Syene was to them their Alps-the water-shed of their world. If there was a stream on the other side, they thought that it must needs flow far away into the Ocean of the South. And these fantastic peaks, not two only, but hundreds, were simplified by them into Crophi and Mophi-the names exactly suit the wild mysterious character of the whole scenery which they represent.

And now it is immediately above the roar of these rapids, but still in the very centre of these colossal rockeries-that you emerge into sight of an island lying in the windings of the river, fringed with palms, and crowned with a long line of temples and colonnades. This is Philæ.

11. PHILE.

The name expresses its situation-it is said to be "Pilek," "the frontier" between Egypt and Ethiopia, and the name seems to have been applied to all the larger islands in this little archipelago. One of these (Biggeh) immediately overhangs Philæ, and is the most remarkable of all the multitude for its fantastic shapes. High from its black top, you overlook what seems an endless crater of these porphyry and granite blocks, many of them carved with ancient figures and hieroglyphics; in the silver lake which they enclose lies Phile, the only flat island amongst them. Its situation is more curious than beautiful, and the same is true of its temples. As seen from the river or the rocks, their brown sandstone colour, their dead walls, hardly emerge sufficiently from the sand and mud cottages which enclose them round, and the palms are not sufficiently numerous to relieve the bare and mean appearance which the rest of the island presents. As seen from within, however, the glimpses of the river, the rocky knolls, and the feathery tresses of the palm, through the vista, the massive walls and colonnades, irregular and perverse in all their proportions, but still grand from their size, are in the highest degree peculiar. Foreground, distance, Art and nature, are here quite unique; the rocks and river (of which you might see the like elsewhere) are wholly unlike Egypt, as the square towers, the devious perspective, and the sculptured walls, are wholly unlike anything else except Egypt.

The whole temple is so modern, that it no way illustrates, except so far as it copies them, the feelings of the religion of the old Egyptians. The earliest, and the only Egyptian, name that occurs upon it, is Nectanebo, an Egyptian prince, who revolted against the later Persian kings. All the rest are the Grecian Ptolemies, and of these the chief is Ptolemy Physcon, or the Fat, so called because he became so bloated by his luxurious living that he measured six feet round, and who proposed, but in vain, to Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi. But in this very fact of its modern origin there is a peculiar interest. It is the fullest specimen of the restoration of the old Egyptian worship by the Ptolemies, and of an attempt, like ours, in Gothic architecture, to revive a style and forms which had belonged to ages far away. The Ptolemies here, as in many other places, were trying "to throw themselves" into Egyptian worship, following in the steps of Alexander "the son of Ammon." In many ways this appears. First, there is much for show without real use. One great side chapel, the finest of the group, is built for the sake of its terrace towards the river. The main entrance to the Temple is, in like manner, no entrance at all. Then there is the want of symmetry which always more or less distinguishes the Egyptian architecture, but is here carried to a ridiculous excess. No perspective is carried consistently through: the sides of the same courts are of different styles: no one gateway is in the same line with another. Lastly there is the curious sight of sculptures contemporary with the finest works of Greek Art, and carved under Grecian kings, as rude and coarse as those under the earliest Pharaohs to be "in keeping" with Egyptian architecture, and to "preserve the ancient type," like the medieval figures in painted windows and the illegible inscriptions round the arches of some modern English churches. And not only are the forms but the subjects imitated, long after all meaning had passed away, and this not only in the religious figures of Isis and the gods. There is something ludicrously grotesque in colossal bas-reliefs of kings seizing innumerable captives by the hair of their head, as in the ancient sculptures of Rameses-kings who reigned at a time when all conquests had ceased, and who had, perhaps, never stirred out of the palaces and libraries of Alexandria.

The mythological interest of the Temple is its connection with Isis, who is its chief divinity, and accordingly the sculptures of her, of Osiris, and of Horus, are countless. The most remarkable, though in a very obscure room, and on a very small scale, is the one representing the death of Osiris, and then his embalmment, burial, gradual restoration, and enthronement as judge of the dead. But this legend belongs, like the rest of the Temple, to the later, not the ancient stage of Egyptian belief.