of the old Egyptians-and still the instinct is the same in their costume. The poetic Howadji would fancy they had studied the beauty of rainbows against dark clouds. For golden and gay are the turbans wreathed around their dusky brows and figures the very people of poetry, of which Titian and Paul divinely dreamed, but could never paint, sit forever in crimson turbans-yellow, blue, and white robes with red slippers crossed under them, languidly breathing smoke over Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. And the buildings in which they sit, the walls of baths, and cafés, and mosques, are painted in the same gorgeous taste, with broad bars of red, and blue, and white. Over all this brilliance streams the intense sunshine, and completes what itself suggested. So warm, so glowing, and rich, is the universal light and atmosphere, that any thing less than this in architecture, would be unnatural. Strange and imperfect as it is, you feel the heart of nature throbbing all through Eastern art Art there follows the plainest hints of nature in costume and architecture now, as in the antique architecture. The fault of oriental art springs from the very excess, which is the universal law of Eastern life. It is the apparent attempt to say more than is sayable. In the infinite and exquisite elaborations of Arabian architecture, there is the evident effort

to realize all the subtle and strange whims of a luxuriously-inspired imagination; and hence results an art that lacks large features and character, like the work of a man who loves the details of his dreams.

The child's faith, that the East lies near the rising sun, is absurd until you are there. Then you feel that it was his first-born, and inherits the elder share of his love and influence. Wherever your eye falls, it sees the sun and the sun's suggestion. Egypt lies hard against its heart. But the sun is like other fathers, and his eldest is spoiled.

So saturated are they would seem to But not so readily,

As you sweep, sun-tranced, up the river, the strongest, most distinct desire of being an artist, is born of silence and the sun. you with light and color, that flow unaided from the brush. importunate reader, from the pen. Words are worsted by the East. Chiaro 'scuro will not give it. A man must be very cunning to persuade his pen to reveal those secrets. But, if an artist, I would tarry and worship a while in the temples of Italy, then hurry across the sea înto the presence of the power there adored. There I should find that Claude was truly a consecrated priest. For this silence and sun breathe beauty along his canvass. His pictures are more than Italian, more than the real sunset from the Pincio; for they are the ideal Italy which bends

over the Nile and fulfills the South. The cluster of boats with gay streamers at Luxor, and the turbaned groups under the temple columns on the shore, do justify those sunset dreams of Claude Lorraine, that stately architecture upon the sea.

I was lost in a sun-dream one afternoon, wondering if, Saturn-like, the sun would not one day utterly consume his child, when I heard the Commander exclaim: "El Karnak!" much as Columbus might have heard "land" from his mast-head.

"There," said the Commander; and I could scarcely believe such a confirmation of my dreams of palm architecture, as my eye followed the point ing of his finger to a dim, distant point.

"Those ?" said I.

"Those," said he.

I looked again with the glass and beheld, solitary and stately upon the distant shore, a company of most undoubted trees! The Pacha was smiling at my side, and declaring that he saw some very fine palms. The Commander looked again, confessed his mistake, and in extenuation, I remarked that he was not golden-sleeved. And, after all, what was Alà-ed-deen, if Mr. Lane will spell Aladdin so, without his lamp?

A few moments after, a small boat drew up to us, and an Emerald Howadji stepped on board He

had left Thebes at two o'clock, which sounded strangely to me when he said it; for I fancied Thebes already to have done with time and become the property of eternity. He coffeed and smoked, and would leave a duck for dinner, gave us all the last news from Thebes, then shook hands and went over the side of the Ibis, and out of our knowledge forever.

Bon voyage, Emerald Howadji! and as he pulled rapidly away with the flowing stream toward his descending dahabieh, he fired at a heron that was streaming whitely over him across the stream-a parting salute, possibly, and the dead heron streamed whitely after him upon the river.

XIV

THEBES TRIUMPHANT.

THE warm vaporous evening gathered, and we moored in a broad, beautiful bay of the river. Far inland over the shore, the mountain lines, differently dark, waved away into the night. There were no masts upon the river but our own, and only one neighboring sakia moaned to the twilight. Groups of turbaned figures crouched upon the bank. They looked as immovable forms of the landscape as the trees. Moulded of mystery, they sat like spirits of the dead-land personified. In the south, the Libyan mountains came to the river, vague and dim, stealthily approaching like the shy monsters of the desert. The eye could not escape the fascination of those fading forms; for those mountains overhung Thebes.

Moored under the palm-trees in the gray beginnings of the evening, by the sad mud huts and the squalid fellah, and within the spell of the sighing sakia, I remembered Thebes and felt an outcast of time.

A world died before our history was born. The