no relationship between them to aggravate the indignity, though they occupied the same soil.

Who were these mighty dead, who have left such monuments behind them, to awe the thoughtful and puzzle the frivolous? Here is a tomb as large as the throne-room at St. James's, and once as elaborately adorned with carving, and gilding, and delicate art; part of it is incomplete-the mark of the chisel, and each line of work, is still, as it were, freshly left. What then caused the sudden arrest of life and labor here? None can ever tell. One hour, a realm alive with strength, and energy, and mighty projects, such as the world has never conceived before or since the next, and all seems changed. That mighty race is gone for ever, and another, heavy with the curse of their great patriarch, arises: crushed and degraded, tyrant after tyrant has trodden them down for two thousand years till now.

These tombs are going rapidly to decay; the pillars and pilasters that supported them are daily rolled down the hill, to make dwellings for the living race of men.

According to the Coptic tradition, Siout was the residence of the holy family, when they took refuge in Egypt from Herod's persecution; such associations invest their localities with an interest that it is unnecessary to analyse. If we can believe in their truth, to us the tradition is realized; and he who would walk through the world, dismissing as untrue all that is incapable of mathematical proof, will lose considerably more than he can gain by his fastidiousness. Such iconoclasts of old faiths, and legends, and traditions, have not only destroyed a great deal of the poetry of daily life, but many a truth, that only required time for its vindication and development, has fallen before the unsparing sceptic, merely because it was in suspicious company.

The appearance of Siout, particularly from the mountains, is very striking and picturesque. Groups of white minarets, and two or three mosque domes, rise from groves of palm-trees and acacia; and many a varied mass of buildings, rather less mudcolored, and more fantastically shaped than those of most of the Egyptian towns, we have hitherto seen. Indeed, these, with the exception of beautiful Minyeh and Manfalout, are deeply in

debted to the thick palm-groves that veil them. Siout is bordered by gardens and kiosks, beyond which stretch the rich plains I have before alluded to.

This city was formerly the refuge of the Mamelukes, and contains a handsome palace, built by Ibrahim Pasha, from the ruins of a despoiled temple. It contains twenty thousand souls, about one thousand of whom are Coptic Christians.

CHAPTER XX.

RIVER INCIDENTS.

Oh, thou beneficent and bounteous stream!
Thou Patriarch River! on whose ample breast
We dwelt the time, that full at once could seem
Of busiest travel and of softest rest.

R. M. MILNES.

WHAT a versatile power our mind possesses of adapting nature to its mood! It is not what a country is, but what we are, that renders it rich in interest or pregnant with enjoyment. Even in this monotonous life we lead upon the Nile, though the scenery, and even the events among which we live, are generally the repetition of the former day's experience; yet the fluctuating mind makes its own variety, and, to say truth, we are not a little indebted to the illusion. Even Egypt cannot supply an inexhaustible excitement of interesting objects; and, although these are unique in their way, the traveller requires to have recourse to study or sheer exercise, if he would preserve his elasticity of mind. The same river is ever murmuring round us; each clay-built village, buried in its graceful grove of palms, appears but a recurrence of the last; the same range of the Arabian mountains, unvarying in form, runs along our left; here and there, the Lybian chain of hills advances and retires from the banks, but it seems always the same hill or glen that lies before us; there are ever the same cloudless sky and delicious temperature (how precious would be a storm!); the same gorgeous sunsets and nightly blue, starry with constellations by which Abraham steered his course from the land of Chaldea: day by day, and week by week, we are tranquilly floating by colossal temples, mountain pyramids, excavated hills, man-made rivers, and monk-made hermitages in which a hyæna might feel lonely. But, lest my reader should weary of such scenery, I will sum up

the impressions I intended to convey in the words of the most agreeable and perhaps instructive, of Egyptian travellers.

"I have realized Horace's idea of complete repose in lying at length under a green arbutus, beside his own bright fountain at Lucretilis; but what is that to reclining under a tent, on a Turkish divan, in an Arab boat ascending the Nile, a neverending diorama of loveliness!--villages, dovecots, mosques, santons' tombs, hermits' cells, temples, pyramids, avenues of the thorny acacia, and loveliest of all, groves after groves of date-trees,

""bending

Languidly their leaf-crowned heads,

Like youthful maids, when sleep descending
Warns them to their silken beds,'

all slumbrous, all gliding past like the scenery of a dream, without effort, peacefully, silently; and yet, as when watching the stars at midnight, you feel all the while as if the sweetest music was murmuring in your ear."*

Such are the scenes among which we live, all dissimilar from those of Europe; and the incidents of our life are no less unlike. Sometimes, it is true, for days together, the north wind fills our sails, and then, of course, we never leave the boat, and are driven to our own resources, the chief of which is reading. The mental activity, and the physical repose, that such an existence superinduces, would make a school-boy studious. Herodotus, who announces, and Belzoni, who discovers, the Egyptian mysteries, are our favorite authors. The former, with his vivid perceptions and simple, yet most graphic, descriptions might have written yesterday, for the Past of Egypt is as its Present.

One reads also with the advantage of copious illustrations; now the traveller is bending over the pages that teem with marvels, now he looks up, beholding them realized, and the incredible rendered credible. Even now we have lost sight of the Pyramids, whose existence the ear never would have credited if the eye had not seen them. Now we are passing Ekmim, where a

* Lord Lindsay.

tradition still lingers that Pharaoh thence summoned the magicians who were to contend with Moses.

Among all the epidemic eccentricities that eve: seized upon the mind of man, the hermit life that St. Antony preached, and that myriads adopted, is perhaps the strangest. Behold a mountain all perforated with caverns, where the Eremites dispossessed the fox and eagle to find a dwelling where they might pass their lives;

"In hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell.”

There, in solitude and silence, dwelt multitudes sufficient to have peopled ambition-haunted, luxury-loving, pleasure-thrilled cities. Among those human eyries, Athanasius, the ecclesiastical dictator, found a refuge from the persecutions of Julian and the Arians. Now we glide under a cliff too steep for even the bold hermit to find footing; but a convent crowns it, and Cœnobites now conspire in the cause which the hermit worked out in solitude. Hark! a cry rises from the water, "Carità! per l'amor di Dio! Christiani! elieeson!" and half a dozen aquatic monks are begging alms round the boat as they swim. The Moslem crew show little disposition to befriend these beggars: our dragoman hands over some piastres, which we suspect are paras, with a very indifferent grace; and the floating friars return to their cliffs, on which, some weeks later, I fired at two crocodiles.

The first time a man fires at a crocodile is an epoch in his life. We had only now arrived in the waters where they abound, for it is a curious fact that none are ever seen below Mineych; though Herodotus speaks of them as fighting with the dolphins at the mouths of the Nile. A prize had been offered for the first man who detected a crocodile, and the crew had now been for two days on the alert in search of them. Buoyed up with the expectation of such game, we had latterly reserved our fire for them exclusively; and the wild duck and turtle, nay, even the vulture and the eagle had swept past, or soared above us in security.

At length, the cry of "Timseach, timseach!" was heard from half a dozen claimants of the proffered prize, and half a dozen