been everywhere and speaks half a dozen languages fluently. In addition
to this he sketches in water colours, plays the fiddle, and breaks in
horses! You have to travel to come across people like that! Here he is
nothing so out of the way--every dragoman is able to talk in three
languages at least. Doesn't it spur you on to feel how much we have to
learn and how ignorant we are in our stay-at-home villages?

All the morning we sit about and watch the graceful white-sailed boats
coming down with cargoes of every kind. Sometimes we see them stranded
on a hidden sandbank with the crew making frantic efforts to get them
off again. We see the reaches lying ahead glittering like jewels in the
sun, and then we land and ride a short way to a temple, under the care
of the dragoman of the boat. The most moving thing in all that temple is
a set of scenes of a hippopotamus hunt shown with great spirit; the poor
little hippo looks more like a pig when he is at the bottom of the water
with a spear or harpoon sticking in him, but when they haul him up by
means of a noose round one leg the ancient artist represents him
becoming bigger and bigger as he comes to the surface!

The walls are, besides, covered with all the usual scenes of the king
making offerings to the gods, and overriding his enemies, and doing all
those noble things which kings wanted their posterity to know about
them.

A high-pitched voice, speaking in a hyper-refined affected tone, breaks
in on our enjoyment; it belongs to one of the English people from the
boat, a lady who evidently considers it her mission in life to instruct
people; information flows from her ten finger-tips, she cannot help it,
she was born to be a schoolmistress certainly.

"That is the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt," she says, "that the king
is wearing; sometimes you see him with one and sometimes with the other,
here he has both together."

As this is about the first thing a dragoman tells anyone in the first
temple he sees, and as it is repeated at least once at every temple
afterwards, only an idiot could fail to know it. We murmur something
politely and turn away. Round a corner we stop to admire the rich colour
still left in the ceiling, where a heavenly blue, covered with golden
stars, represents the sky.

"When we were here three years ago," says the lady at our elbows, "they
had not uncovered those pillars, but we are told--that----"

The peace and beauty are spoilt! Again we mu