The vessel was not large, the interior accommodation consisting of a white-painted saloon, a narrow passage, from which a small cabin and a bathroom led off, and a fair-sized bedroom at the stern. Above their apartments was the deck, across which awnings of richly-coloured Arab tenting were drawn when the ship was not under sail. In the prow were the kitchen and quarters of the native sailors.
Abu Simbel is a hundred and seventy miles up stream from Shallâl; and, sailing from silver dawn to golden sunset, and mooring each night under the jewelled indigo of the skies, the journey occupied some five enchanted days. The beauty of the rugged country and their own hearts’ happiness, caused the hours to pass with the rapidity of a dream. Even the heat of the powerful sun seemed to be mitigated for them by the prevalent north-west wind, which bellied out the great sail and drove the heavy prow forward so that it divided the waters into two singing waves.
Now they sailed past dense and silent groves of palms backed by precipitous rocks; now they shattered the reflections of glacier-like slopes of yellow sand marked by no footprints; and now they glided into the shadow of dark and towering cliffs. Sometimes a ruined and lonely temple of the days of the Pharaohs would drift across the theatre of their vision; sometimes the huts of a village, built upon the shelving sides of a hill, would pass before their eyes and slide away into the distance; and sometimes across the water there would come to their ears the dreamy creaking of a sâkiyeh, or water-wheel, and the song of the naked boy who drove the blindfolded oxen round and round its rickety platform.
At length in the darkness of early night they moored under the terrace of the great temple of Abu Simbel, and awoke at daybreak to see from the window of their cabin the four colossal statues of Rameses gazing high across their little vessel towards the dawn.
These mighty figures, sixty feet and more in height, carved out of the face of the cliff, sit in a solemn row, two on each side of the doorway which leads into the vast halls excavated in the living rock. Their serene eyes are fixed upon the eastern horizon, their lips are a little smiling, their hands rest placidly upon their knees; and now, in the first light of morning, they loomed out of the fading shadow like cold, calm figures of destiny, knowing all that the day would bring forth and finding in that knowledge no cause for vexation.
With a simultaneous impulse Jim and Monimé rose from their bed, and, quickly dressing, hastened up the sandy path to the terrace of the temple, that they might see the first rays of the sun strike upon those great, unblinking eyes.
They had not long to wait. Suddenly a warm flush suffused the pale, rigid faces, a flush that did not seem to be thrown from the sunrise. It was as though some internal flame of vitality had transmuted the hard rock into living flesh; it was as though the blood were coursing through the solid stone, and miraculous, monstrous life were come into being at the touch of the god of the sun. The eyes seemed to open wider, the lips to be about to open, the nostrils to dilate....
Monimé clasped hold of Jim’s hand. “They are going to speak,” she exclaimed. “They are going to rise up from their four thrones.”
In awe they stood, a little Hop o’ my Thumb and his wife, staring up out of the blue shadows of the terrace to the huge, flushed faces above them. But the miracle was quickly ended. The sun ascended from behind the eastern hills, and in its full radiance the colossal figures were once more turned to inanimate stone, to wait until to-morrow’s recurrence of that one supreme moment in which the pulse of life is vouchsafed to them.