ly into renunciation, asceticism and fraternal pity.

How strange it is to say! Even while the sculptor was carving this
archaic bas-relief, and was using, for the engraving of its name,
characters that dated back to the night of the ages, there were already
Christians assembled in the catacombs at Rome and dying in ecstasy in
the arena!

CHAPTER XIII

MODERN LUXOR

The waters of the Nile being already low my dahabiya--delayed by
strandings--had not been able to reach Luxor, and we had moored
ourselves, as the darkness began to fall, at a casual spot on the bank.

"We are quite near," the pilot had told me before departing to make his
evening prayer; "in an hour, to-morrow, we shall be there."

And the gentle night descended upon us in this spot which did not seem
to differ at all from so any others where, for a month past now, we had
moored our boat at hazard to await the daybreak. On the banks were dark
confused masses of foliage, above which here and there a high date-palm
outlined its black plumes. The air was filled with the multitudinous
chirpings of the crickets of Upper Egypt, which make their music here
almost throughout the year in the odorous warmth of the grass. And,
presently, in the midst of the silence, rose the cries of the night
birds, like the mournful mewings of cats. And that was all--save for
the infinite calm of the desert that is always present, dominating
everything, although scarcely noticed and, as it were, latent.

*****

And this morning, at the rising of the sun, is pure and splendid as
all other mornings. A tint of rosy coral comes gradually to life on the
summit of the Libyan mountains, standing out from the gridelin shadows
which, in the heavens, were the rearguard of the night.

But my eyes, grown accustomed during the last few weeks to this
glorious spectacle of the dawn, turn themselves, as if by force of some
attraction, towards a strange and quite unusual thing, which, less than
a mile away along the river, on the Arabian bank, rises upright in the
midst of the mournful plains. At first it looks like a mass of towering
rocks, which in this hour of twilight magic have taken on a pale violet
colour, and seem almost transparent. And the sun, scarcely emerged
from the desert, lights them in a curious gradation, and orders their
contours with a fringe of fresh rose-colour. And they are not rocks, in
fact, for as we look more closely, they show us lines symmetrical
and strai