evils could
think of etching every rock outcrop with wind-lines, or skinning it down
to its glistening nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the
likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town-suburbs; of covering
the space of half an English county with sepia studies of interlacing
and recrossing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition of much
too clever perspective; and of wiping out the half-finished work with a
wash of sand in three tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on
the horizon's edge. This they do in order to make lost travellers think
they can recognise landmarks and run about identifying them till the
madness comes. The Desert is all devil-device--as you might say 'blasted
cleverness'--crammed with futile works, always promising something fresh
round the next corner, always leading out through heaped decoration and
over-insistent design into equal barrenness.

There was a morning of mornings when we lay opposite the rock-hewn
Temple of Abu Simbel, where four great figures, each sixty feet high,
sit with their hands on their knees waiting for Judgment Day. At their
feet is a little breadth of blue-green crop; they seem to hold back all
the weight of the Desert behind them, which, none the less, lips over at
one side in a cataract of vividest orange sand. The tourist is
recommended to see the sunrise here, either from within the temple where
it falls on a certain altar erected by Rameses in his own honour, or
from without where another Power takes charge.

The stars had paled when we began our watch; the river birds were just
whispering over their toilettes in the uncertain purplish light. Then
the river dimmered up like pewter; the line of the ridge behind the
Temple showed itself against a milkiness in the sky; one felt rather
than saw that there were four figures in the pit of gloom below it.
These blocked themselves out, huge enough, but without any special
terror, while the glorious ritual of the Eastern dawn went forward. Some
reed of the bank revealed itself by reflection, black on silver; arched
wings flapped and jarred the still water to splintered glass; the desert
ridge turned to topaz, and the four figures stood clear, yet without
shadowing, from their background. The stronger light flooded them red
from head to foot, and they became alive--as horridly and tensely yet
blindly alive as pinioned men in the death-chair before the current is
switched on. One felt that