ire daughters of Chicago merchants
elbow their sisters of the old nobility. Pressing amongst them impudent
young Bedouins pester the fair travellers to mount their saddled
donkeys. And as if they were charged to add to this babel a note of
beauty, the battalions of Mr. Cook, of both sexes, and always in a
hurry, pass by with long strides.

Beyond the shops, following the line of the quay, there are other
hotels. Less aggressive, all of them, than the Winter Palace, they have
had the discretion not to raise themselves too high, and to cover their
fronts with white chalk in the Arab fashion, even to conceal themselves
in clusters of palm-trees.

And finally there is the colossal temple of Luxor, looking as out of
place now as the poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, and
which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde.

Bordering the Nile, it is a colossal grove of stone, about three hundred
yards in length. In epochs of a magnificence that is now scarcely
conceivable this forest of columns grew high and thick, rising
impetuously at the bidding of Amenophis and the great Ramses. And how
beautiful it must have been even yesterday, dominating in its superb
disarray this surrounding country, vowed for centuries to neglect and
silence!

But to-day, with all these things that men have built around it, you
might say that it no longer exists.

We reach an iron-barred gate and, to enter, have to show our permit to
the guards. Once inside the immense sanctuary, perhaps we shall find
solitude again. But, alas, under the profaned columns a crowd of people
passes, with _Baedekers_ in their hands, the same people that one sees
here everywhere, the same world as frequents Nice and the Riviera. And,
to crown the mockery, the noise of the dynamos pursues us even here, for
the boats of Messrs. Cook are moored to the bank close by.

Hundreds of columns, columns which are anterior by many centuries to
those of Greece, and represent, in their naive enormity, the first
conceptions of the human brain. Some are fluted and give the impression
of sheaves of monstrous weeds; others, quite plain and simple, imitate
the stem of the papyrus, and bear by way of capital its strange flower.
The tourists, like the flies, enter at certain times of the day, which
it suffices to know. Soon the little bells of the hotels will call
them away and the hour of midday will find me here alone. But what in
heaven's name will deliver me from the nois