XXXII.

NORTHWARD.

WE floated and rowed slowly down the river. When the wind blew violently the crew did not row at all, and we took our chance at floating, spinning round upon the river, and drifting from shore to shore. When it swelled to a gale, we drew in under the bank and allowed its fury to pass. Once, for two days it held us fast, and the irate Howadji could do nothing but await the pleasure of a lull. But the gale outlasted their patience. They had explored all the neighboring shore, had seen the women with glass beads, and necklaces, and black woollen garments, and crisp woolly hair. They had sat upon the mud seats of the houses, and had been the idols of popular attention and admiration. But the wind would not blow away, and the too happy crew stretched upon the bank, and shielded by it, slept and chatted all day long. The third day, the gale still blew, though feebly, and orders for tracking were issued from the blue cabin. There was great reluctance, for it is hard

work to pull a Junk or Gundelow against a wind. And as the supple-limbed, smooth-skinned Mohammad, one of the best workers of the crew, undertook, standing on the shore among the rest, who did not dare to speak, to expostulate and complain, the Pacha, in a royal rage, was about springing upon him for tremendous chastisement, when Mohammed, warned by his fellows, sprang up the bank and disappeared. The rest, appalled and abashed, seized the rope and went to work. We tracked but a few miles that day, however, for it was too heavy work.

The wind died at last, but it was never as peaceable as it should have been. For although the hopeful ascending Howadji hears that with January or February the soft southern gales begin to blow, and will waft him as gently northward as the north winds blew him south, he finds that those southern gales blow only in poetry, or poetic memory.

In the calmer pauses, however, we tracked and rowed, and drifted to Dekkar, and a yellow, vaporous moon led us to the temple. Seyd accompanied the Howadji with the portable crate, wherewith they were to do their share of smoking the remains. All Nubia was asleep in the yellow moonlight, and the inhabitants of Dekkar rushed forth from their huts as we passed along, the huge Seyd preceding, bearing the crate like a trophy, and snarling

at all curs that shivered the hushed silence with their shrieks. Doubtless, as we approached the temple, and the glare of our torches flashed through its darkness, meditative jackals and other beasts of prey withdrew to the more friendly dark of distance. And then, if ever, standing in the bright moonlight among Egyptian ruins, the apostrophes, and sentimentalities, and extravagancies, of Volney and his brood, flap duskily through the mind like birds of omen ill.

There is something essentially cheerful, however, in an Egyptian ruin. It stands so boldly bare in the sun and moon, its forms are so massive and precise, its sculptures so simply outlined, and of such serene objectivity of expression, and time deals so gently with the ruin's self, as if reluctant, through love or fear, to obliterate it, or even to hang it with flowery weepers and green mosses, that your feeling shares the freshness of the ruin, and you reserve for the Coliseum or the Parthenon that luxury of soft sentiment, of which Childe Harold's apostrophe to Rome is the excellent expression. We must add to this, too, the entire separation from our sympathy, of the people and principles that originated these structures. The Romans are our friends and neigh bors in time, for they lived only yesterday. History sees clearly to the other side of Rome, and beholds

the campagna and the mountains, before the wolf was whelped, that mothered a world. But along these shores history sees not much more than we can see. It cannot look within the hundred gates of Thebes, and babbles very inarticulately about what it professes to know. We have a vague feeling that this was the eldest born of Time-certainly, his most accomplished and wisest child, and that the best of our knowledge is a flower off that trunk. But that is not enough to bring us near to it. The Colossi sit speechless, but do not look as if they would speak our language, even were their tongues loosed. Theirs is another beauty, another feeling than ours, and except to passionless study and universal cosmopolitan interest, Egypt has only the magnetism of mystery for us, until the later days of its decline.

Our human interest enters Egypt with Alexander the Great and the Greeks, and becomes vivid and redly warm with the Romans and Cleopatra, with Cæsar and Marc Antony, with Hadrian and Antinous. The rest are phantoms and spectres that haunt the shores. Therefore, there are two interests and two kinds of remains in Egypt, the Pharaohnic and the Ptolemaic-the former represents the eldest and the latter the youngest, history of the land. The elder is the genuine old Egyptian inter

est, the younger the Greco-Egyptian-after the conquest-after the glorious son had returned to engraft his own development upon the glorious sire. It was the tree in flower, transplanted. No Howadji denies that the seed was Egyptian, but poet Martineau perpetually reviles the Greeks for their audacity in coming to Egypt, can with difficulty contain her dissatisfaction at pausing to see the Ptolemaic remains, finds that word sufficient description and condemnation. But the Greeks, notwithstanding, rarely spoiled anything they touched, and here in Egypt, they inoculated massiveness with grace, and grandeur with beauty. Of course there was always something lost. An Egyptian temple built by Greek-taught natives, or by Greeks who wished to compromise a thousand jealousies and prejudices, must, like all other architecture, be emblematical of the spirit of the time and of the people. Yet in gaining grace the Howadji is not disposed to think that Egyptian architecture lost much of its grandeur. The rock temples, the oldest Egyptian remains, have all the imposing interest of the might and char acter of primitive races grandly developing in art. But as the art advances to separate structures, and slowly casts away a crust of crudities, although it may lose in solid weight, it gains in every other

way.