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large. "That man," said he, "once talked, and laughed, and sang, and danced, and ate macaroni." Among the paintings on the walls was represented a heap of hands severed from the arms, showing that the hero of the tomb had played the tyrant in his brief hour on earth. I dashed the scull against a stone, broke it in fragments, and pocketed a piece as a memorial of a king. Paul cut off one of the ears, and we left the tomb.

Travellers and commentators concur in supposing that these magnificent excavations must have been intended for other uses than the burial, each of a single king. Perhaps, it is said, like the chambers of imagery seen by the Jewish prophet, they were the scene of idolatrous rites performed "in the dark ;" and, as the Israelites are known to have been mere copyists of the Egyptians, these tombs are supposed to illustrate the words of Ezekiel:-" Then said he to me, Son of man, dig now in the wall; and when I had digged in the wall, behold a door. And he said unto me, Go in, and see the abominable things that they do there. So I went in, and saw, and behold, every form of creeping thing and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about."-Ezek., viii., 8-10.

Amid the wrecks of former greatness which tower above the plain of Thebes, the inhabitants who now hover around the site of the ancient city are perhaps the most miserable in Egypt. On one side of the river they build their mud huts around

the ruins of the temples, and on the other their best habitations are in the tombs; wherever a small space has been cleared out, the inhabitants crawl in, with their dogs, goats, sheep, women, and children; and the Arab is passing rich who has for his sleeping-place the sarcophagus of an ancient Egyptian.

I have several times spoken of my intended journey to the great Oasis. Something was yet wanting in my voyage on the Nile. It was calm, tame, and wanting in that high excitement which I had expected from travelling in a barbarous country. A woman and child might go safely from Cairo to the Cataracts; and my blood began to run sluggishly in my veins. Besides, I had a great curiosity to see an oasis; a small spot of green fertile land in the great desert, rising in solitary beauty before the eyes of the traveller, after days of journeying through arid wastes, and divided by vast sandy ramparts from the rest of the world. The very name of the great Oasis in the Lybian desert carried with it a wild and almost fearful interest, too powerful for me to resist. It was beyond the beaten track; and the sheik with whom I made my arrangements insisted on my taking a guard, telling me that he understood the character of his race, and an Arab in the desert could not resist the temptation to rob an unprotected traveller. For my own part, I had more fear of being followed by a party of the very unprepossessing fellows who were stealthily digging among the tombs, and all of whom knew of the

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preparations for our journey, than from any we might encounter in the desert. I must confess, however, that I was rather amused when I reviewed my body-guard, and, with the gravest air in the world, knocked out the primings from their guns, and primed them anew with the best of English powder. When I got through I was on the point of discharging them altogether, but it would have broken the poor fellows' hearts to disappoint them of their three piasters (about fifteen cents) per diem, dearly earned by a walk all day in the desert, and a chance of being shot at.

In the afternoon before the day fixed for my departure, I rode by the celebrated Memnons, the Damy and Shamy of the Arabs. Perhaps it was because it was the last time, but I had never before looked upon them with so much interest. Among the mightier monuments of Thebes, her temples and her tombs, I had passed these ancient statues with a comparatively careless eye, scarcely bestowing a thought even upon the vocal Memnon. Now I was in a different mood, and looked upon its still towering form with a feeling of melancholy interest. I stood before it and gazed up at its worn face, its scars and bruises, and my heart warmed to it. It told of exposure, for unknown ages, to the rude assaults of the elements, and the ruder assaults of man. I climbed upon the pedestal-upon the still hardy legs of the Memnon. I pored over a thousand inscriptions in Greek and Latin. A thousand names of strangers from distant lands, who had come like me to do

homage to the mighty monuments of Thebes; Greeks and Romans who had been in their graves more than 2000 years, and who had written with their own hands that they had heard the voice of the vocal Memnon. But, alas! the voice has departed from Memnon; the soul has fled, and it stands a gigantic skeleton in a grave of ruins. I returned to my boat, and in ten minutes thereafter, if the vocal Memnon had bellowed in my ears, he could not have waked me.

CHAPTER X.

The Arabs and the Pacha.-March into the Desert.-Arab Christians. A cold Reception-Arab Punctuality.-A Night in a Convent.-An Arab Christian Priest.-Speculative Theology.— A Journey ended before commenced.

EARLY in the morning I was on the bank, waiting for my caravan and guides. I had every thing ready, rice, macaroni, bread, biscuit, a hare, and a few shirts. I had given instructions to my rais to take my boat down to Siout, and wait for me there, as my intention was to go from the great Oasis to the Oasis of Siwah, containing the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, to destroy which Cambyses had sent from this very spot an army of 50,000 men, who, by-the-way, left their bones on the sands of Africa; and I need not remind the

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reader that Alexander the Great had visited it in person, and been acknowledged by the priests as the son of Jupiter. I waited a little longer, and then, becoming impatient, mounted a donkey to ride to the sheik's. My rais and crew accompanied me a little way; they were the only persons to bid us farewell; and, as Paul remarked, if we never got back, they were the only persons to make any report of us to our friends.

The sheik's house was situated near the mountains, in the midst of the tombs forming the great Necropolis of Thebes, and we found him surrounded by fifty or sixty men, and women and children without number, all helping to fit out the expedition. There did not seem to be much choice among them; but I picked out my body-guard, and when I looked at their swarthy visages by broad daylight, I could not help asking the sheik what security I had against them. The sheik seemed a little touched, but, pointing to the open doors of the tombs, and the miserable beings around us, he said that he had their wives and children in his hands as pledges for my safety. Of the sheik himself I knew nothing, except that he was sheik. I knew, too, that though by virtue of the pacha's firman he was bound to do every thing he could for me, he was no friend to the pacha or his government; for one evening, in speaking of the general poverty of the Arabs, he said that if one fourth of them owned a musket, one charge of powder, and one ball, before morning there would not be a Turk in Egypt. However, I knew all this before.