We spent the next three days at Karnak and Thebes, saving the tombs of the kings until we should stop again on our way down from Assuan.
And now the important question was, Where should we spend Christinas? The better we knew Karnak and Thebes, the more forbidding they had grown. They were too stiff and formal, and their great rigid Rameses too depressing for a Christmas. We wanted a cheerful temple, and we found it at Komombos.
We left Karnak on the morning of December 24, and spent Christmas eve at Edfu. That night the deck was entirely housed in by canvas. The crew sat in a circle back of the smoke-stack, and while they divided the cigarettes we had bought for them at Luxor, they listened to our “Down upon the Suwanee River.”
Christmas morning we came on deck, and found that Ghesiri had transformed it into a bower of palm-branches, sugar-cane, and oranges. The crew were all smiles, and when we presented them with the price of a sheep, they gave us three cheers and a merry Christmas. More cigarettes were distributed, and shortly after breakfast we started for Komombos.
There was little in the day to remind a New-Englander of Christmas. In the lightest clothes, we sat about the deck and watched the villages go by. It was good to see our old friends the water-wheels and cheerful sakiehs again. They looked better to us after our somber stay at Karnak. Early in the afternoon we came to Komombos, the temple we were looking for, and tied to the river’s bank just below it; and if you must be traveling on Christmas, there can be no better place to stop.
At Komombos the never-resting Nile has worked its way to the foot of the little hill on which the temple is making its last stand
Thebes, January 2, 1898.
against time. Some kind friends have covered the bank with stones, but the river is slowly wearing them away, and sooner or later it will claim its own; and it will be a pity, for Komombos’s temple is dainty in comparison with Karnak, where great stiff Rameses stand with their arms folded across their breasts in very much the same manner in which the real arms are held in the glass case at the Gizeh Museum.