Our trips back from Thebes were always enlivened by donkey-races across the great fields of young wheat, in the middle of which the great Memnons sit. Those races generally proved that “Columbus” was a faster donkey than “New York.”
Pharaoh must have continually thought of the future. His tombs at Thebes show how anxious he was to outlast time. And it seems hard that his carefully prepared plans should have been interfered with. How impressive it would be to find, at the end of the long subterranean passage, the king whose one wish had been to lie there. He must have visited it often before his death. He might have superintended its building and criticized the drawings that decorate its walls. But the sarcophagus is now empty, and its lid is broken, and the king’s new friends have put him in a cheap wooden house; and written
At the Races, Khedival Sporting Club.
An Assuan Beggar.
on a piece of cardboard, and tacked on the glass case in which he now lies, is the name he was so fond of cutting in granite.
One year more or less makes very little difference to Egypt, but the New Year was properly welcomed aboard the Nitocris, for one of us had never seen a January 1 before. So it happened that, even in Egypt, the occasion was treated as a novelty, and the Nitocris once more blossomed out with lanterns, and looked as well that night as her more graceful rivals, the sailing-dahabiyehs, that were anchored above and below us.
January 4 was our last day at Luxor. We had ridden up the limestone valley at Thebes to the tombs of the kings, had spent several days and a moonlight night at Karnak. We had said good-by to our donkey-boys. Mine had held an umbrella over me with one hand and had fought natives at the same time with the other, and I hope that some day he will be a dragoman. Before daylight on the 5th we had once more started north, with only five more days on the river left to us. At night we tied to the bank and walked through moon-lighted villages, and did our best to imagine that our journey had only just begun.