By noon on the 9th we reached the fatal bend in the river and saw that we were once more in the land of pyramids, and we were soon tied to the bank beneath which once stood the city of Memphis. We rode to Marietta’s House, past the pyramids and the colossal Rameses lying on his back among tall palms, surrounded, for some reason, by a mud house, as if the great granite figure had not already proved that it could continue its battle with time unassisted by a few mud bricks and some tin roofing that is very much in the way.
We lighted candles and walked through the hot, suffocating galleries of the mausoleum, and peered into the huge granite sarcophagi that once held the mummied sacred bulls. Then we rode to the tomb of Ti, and Ghesiri’s last lecture was about that gentleman.
Beni-Hassan.
In the distance was Cairo; and even a view of the pyramids at Gizeh and the citadel failed to console us, and we still mourned our late month on the Nile. We took our last donkey-ride through the palms that now grow where Memphis once stood, and reached the Nitocris by sundown.
By midday on the 10th, we shook hands with the crew and left the Nitocris tied to the bank where we had first found her, just as though nothing had happened; and, after all, what had happened was this: six more tourists had gone to the first cataract and back, and a few more Egyptian sketches had been made. For us the performance of the Nile was at an end, and we were once more in the streets on our way to the Ghezireh Hotel, with a determination to console ourselves with Cairo, which now looked to us, after our stay in the country, like a full-grown European capital.
By January 10 the season had commenced
At Philæ.