pose, and you can see the Nubian Desert and Nubia. The web of shining gold and purple, sand and rocks, stretches limitlessly both sides of the river. And just below you is the little plot of Nubia-the grey-brown mud huts of Korosko, hundreds of them huddled into one small village. Beside them the grateful vividness of just a field or two of green corn. The Nile is nothing but a sun-scaled serpent winding over the desert; from this height he is more than ever a passing traveller, hardly concerning himself with Nubia's forlorn little patch of green. He is journeying to his Egypt. You never heard him called the river of Nubia, nor yet, for all the thousands of miles he goes, anything else than the river of Egypt.

February 17. From the condemnation of old Egyptian art I passed the other day I must now except Abu Simbel. It is the most original and by far the most impressive of the ancient monuments. We saw it first at night by flaring limelight. The temple is hewn out of a solid cliff of red sandstone. The door is

AN IMPRESSIVE MONUMENT.

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a low one; the squared face and the interior very high. Here again, as in all the other temples, the mechanical wonder of the achievement is more than the beauty of it. Yet Abu Simbel, if not beautiful, is grand. For, two on either side of the doorway, sit four colossal statues, carved in relief out of the rock face. They are so well proportioned that they do not strike you as immense, but how immense they are you may judge from the fragments. of one that has fallen. In the morning there they sat-one defaced, three almost perfect, leaning in quiet majesty against the precipice, gazing across the river to the climbing sun. The interior of the temple is nothing, and there are no houses nor any buildings near, nor any growth or other sign of life. Nothing at all in sight but those four great, silent serene warders by the door, looking changelessly out over the river to the desolation.

Thence, in the early afternoon, we came to wind-swept Wady Halfa- the end of our journey for so many years the end of the authority of Egypt. Few towns have had

more varying fortunes in the last two decades. It was always bound to exist, because it is at the foot of the second cataract. Once it was to be the great terminus of Ismail's railway to Khartoum. In Egypt's evil days it was a

great fortress and garrison town-which is why its little bazaar of Tenfikish is warned off to a mile below it. Five years ago raiding dervishes crept round the town, and hacked and stabbed through all the bazaar. To-day

Halfa is almost bare of garrison, but all day it clanks, and crashes, and rings with the labour of transport and railway engineering. It looks no longer backward to Egypt, which it used to guard, but forward to the conquests for which it purveys. Which is one more token, for the very end of your journey, that England is going through with her work in Egypt.

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XXIV.

COOK.

IS HE A MAN OR A MACHINE?-OVERCOMING NATIVE PREJUDICES-TRIAL OF THE PRINCE ABBAS-A MAN OF FORCE-A WONDERFUL ORGANISATION-INFLUX OF TOURISTS-GERMANS

IN EGYPT-COOK PASHA.

February 18.-To the general English mind Cook represents a sort of machine which sits in Ludgate Circus and punches little holes in tickets. It never occurred to me, somehow, that Cook might be a man. But he is. I have seen him, and spoken with him, and eaten with him, and voyaged with him four days, and he is very much a man indeed.

Is it not a wonderful chance to meet with Cook in the flesh? It would hardly be more stirring to meet the Attraction of Gravitation in a Terai hat standing solidly at Assouan