From a photograph by James S. Lee
THE TEMPLE OF ISIS, PHILÆ
foreign countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty, but to earn a living wage.
And “Pharaoh’s Bed” looks out over the water and seems to wonder what will be the end.
I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far off a gray smudge—the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of rubbish, some of them gray, some of them in color so dark that they resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the “black country” in England through which one rushes on one’s way to the North. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over grit stone and granite.