row, how they worshipped God--all set down by
themselves at the very time when they were doing these things. You can
even see the games at which the children used to play, and the queer
old-fashioned toys and dolls that they played with, and you can read the
stories which their mothers and their nurses used to tell them.

These are the things which make this old land of Egypt so interesting to
us all to-day; and I want to try to tell you about some of them, so that
you may be able to have in your mind's eye a real picture of the life of
those long past days.

CHAPTER II

A DAY IN THEBES

If any foreigner were wanting to get an idea of our country, and to see
how our people live, I suppose the first place that he would go to would
be London, because it is the capital of the whole country, and its
greatest city; and so, if we want to learn something about Egypt, and
how people lived there in those far-off days, we must try to get to the
capital of the country, and see what is to be seen there.

Suppose, then, that we are no longer living in Britain in the twentieth
century, but that somehow or other we have got away back into the past,
far beyond the days of Jesus Christ, beyond even the times of Moses,
and are living about 1,300 years before Christ. We have come from Tyre
in a Phoenician galley, laden with costly bales of cloth dyed with
Tyrian purple, and beautiful vessels wrought in bronze and copper, to
sell in the markets of Thebes, the greatest city in Egypt. We have
coasted along past Carmel and Joppa, and, after narrowly escaping being
driven in a storm on the dangerous quicksand called the Syrtis, we have
entered one of the mouths of the Nile. We have taken up an Egyptian
pilot at the river mouth, and he stands on a little platform at the bow
of the galley, and shouts his directions to the steersmen, who work the
two big rudders, one on either side of the ship's stern. The north wind
is blowing strongly and driving us swiftly upstream, in spite of the
current of the great river; so our weary oarsmen have shipped their
oars, and we drive steadily southwards under our one big swelling sail.

At first we sail along through a broad flat plain, partly cultivated,
and partly covered with marsh and marsh plants. By-and-by the green
plain begins to grow narrower; we are coming to the end of the Delta,
and entering upon the real valley of Egypt. Soon we pass a great city,
its temples standing out clear again