beach, we read how the Rip Van Winkle and other dahabiyehs had gone to Abu-Simbel.
The next morning we chose the nine-o’clock train, in preference to camels and donkeys; and after some minutes of rocking and twisting in the little box-car, we were ferried from the mainland to the famous island, where we were to forget Komombos and all the others amid new beauties, which no guide-book can exaggerate.
After lunch we walked to the northern end of the island, hoarded a big, clumsy, eight-oared boat with a great deal of rigging lashed overhead, and our homeward journey began. There was a crew of ten, and we soon had the greatest respect for their skill, especially one little man with crooked teeth, who sat in the stern and shouted over our heads at the men in the boat.
The rapids were tame enough at first. The wind was strong against us, and we found some shelter behind the high granite islands we drifted among. The river had worn them into fantastic shapes so closely resembling temples that hieroglyphics had been cut on the polished stones by the Pharaohs, who never tired of seeing their names in print.
At one place we stopped and watched ten or fifteen boys swim and float down a part of the rapids. They would come shivering up to us, and the next instant they would be in
Camel-back.
the water shooting by us on a log, screaming to attract our attention, and then back again to us, with their teeth chattering for bakshish.
But after that it was very different. The man at the tiller half stood up, and I could see, by the little patches of sand on his forehead that the wrinkles there had formed in two parallel lines, that he had been praying while we had been watching the boys swim, and by the same sign I could see that most of the crew had been doing the same thing; and Mohammed must have been with us, for fifty times within half that number of minutes we needed help. With the little man in the stern continually wetting his lips and jamming the tiller from side to side, apparently steering in just the wrong place, and always proving that he was right, we “shot” over the uneven surface of the river, dodging half-buried rocks, first near one bank and then the other, until we reached the natural bed of the