“Those tender, sad, pathetic hills, and beyond them the mournful mountains, possessing nothing,—not a blade of grass, not a lichen, not a herb; they are absolute paupers amongst mountains, and they might be in the moon, these derelicts, so bereft are they of all things.
“And yet the light, the atmosphere, give them a consoling beauty. What a poem might be written to them as they look thus for a minute or two before the dark-blue pall of night sinks down!”
Wady Sabooah, the “Valley of Lions,” was one of the most striking things I had seen on this exquisite section of our river voyage. The abrupt sand-hills held shadows of the most delicate amethyst at noonday which, combined with the gold of the sunlit parts, produced a delicacy of vibrating tones which enchanted the eye but saddened the artist’s mind, recognising as it did the futility of trying to record such things in paint! But I shall weary you with all this daily rapture, and I will bid good-bye in these pages to the desert, well named by the Moslems “The Garden of Allah.” There is no pollution there, and He may walk in His garden unoffended.
In the first really hot days of March I and the children came home—Wady Halfa was becoming no place for us, and W. remained with his Brigade through the weary days of summer, unknown in their exhausted and horrible listlessness to me who will always think of the Nile as an earthly paradise. One halt I must make on our way down, at Abu Simbel, that mysterious rock temple I had longed to see in the first ray of sunrise, for it faces due east. W., who accompanied us as far as Assouan, gave orders that our stern-wheeler (the old “Fostât” had been dismissed) should tie up overnight at the temple, and before daylight I was up and ready. I had packed my water-colours and had only a huge canvas and oil-paints available. With these I climbed the hill and waited for the first ray in the wild wind of dawn.
The event was all I hoped for as regards the effect of those “scarlet shafts” on the four great figures (how many sunrises had they already awakened to?) “A great cameo,” Miss Amelia Edwards calls that façade at sunrise in her fascinating book, and that phrase had made me long for years for this moment. But alas! my canvas acted as a sail before the wind and nearly carried me into the river, the sand powdered the wet paint more viciously than ever, and I returned very blue to breakfast. Still, I had got my “Abu Simbel at Sunrise,” and I insert a water-colour taken in comfort from the hard-earned but scarcely presentable original.
