the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering canopy of
blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from the lifted hands
of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island and the river;
memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old gods to whom the
temples were reared surely held converse with the spirits of the desert,
with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of the great spaces, under
the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I could not believe the
asservations of certain practical persons, full of the hard and almost
angry desire of "Progress," that no harm had been done by the creation
of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary, it had benefited the
temple. The action of the water upon the stone, they said with vehement
voices, instead of loosening it and causing it to crumble untimely away,
had tended to harden and consolidate it. Here I should like to lie, but
I resist the temptation. Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly the
English engineers have helped to prolong the lives of the buildings of
Philae, and Monsieur Maspero has declared that "the state of the temple
of Philae becomes continually more satisfactory." So be it! Longevity
has been, by a happy chance, secured. But what of beauty? What of the
beauty of the past, and what of the schemes for the future? Is
Philae even to be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be
artificially raised still higher, until Philae ceases to be? Soon, no
doubt, an answer will be given.

Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the
water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
thing stricken with some creeping malady--one of those maladies which
begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.

I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal--Shellal with
its railway-station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of
screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun,
its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen, Egyptian,
Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the
desert lay all around--the great sands, the great masses of granite
that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into o