triumph-but caresses palm-belted Syene as it flies, and calms itself gradually beyond, among serene green shores.

The Ibis reached the first rapid. The swift rush of the river and the favoring wind held it a long time stationary. Had the wind lulled, she would have swung round suddenly with the stream, and plunged against the rocks that hemmed her-rocks watching the Ibis as inexorably as desert monsters their prey.

Suddenly a score of savages leaped shouting and naked into the water, and buffeting the rapid, reached a rock with a rope. This they clumsily attached to a stump, and the yelling savages on board pulled at it and drew us slowly up. Like imps and demons, the black sinners clambered over the sharp points and along the rocks, shouting and plunging into the rapid, to reach another rock—at home as much in the black water as out of it-madly dancing and deviling about; so that, surveying the mummy-swathed groups on deck, and the hopeless shores and the dark devils, the Nile was the Nile no longer, but the Styx, and the Ibis, Charon's barque of death. The tumult was terrible. No one seemed to command, and the superintendent kept up a vigorous application of the kurbash to the adjacent shoulders, but without the slightest practical influence upon the voyage. In the hellish howling of the rabble, and sure swiftness and dash of the stream, a little silent sense had been heavenly. For the channels are so narrow that it needs only a strong rope and a strong pull to insure the ascent. A few blocks, beams, and pulleys, apon points where a purchase is necessary, would make

the ascent rapid and easy. There are, at this point, not more than four or five rapids, a few yards wide each one, at the narrowest. Between these hell-gates, there is room to sail, if there be wind enough, and if not, the tracking, with many men, is not arduous.

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The poet Martineau and Belzoni are at issue upon the savage faculty." This mystery, of which the Howadji could never discover the slightest trace, charmed the poet Harriet particularly at this point. Belzoni says of these men, that their utmost sagacity reaches only to pulling a rope, or sitting on the extremity of a lever as a counterpoise; and he also, in a very unpoetic fervor, declares that in point of skill, they are no better than beasts. Certainly it would be strange if a race so ignorant and clumsy in all things else, should develop fine faculties here. These demons drew the Ibis up the rapids, as they would have drawn a wagon up a hill-the success and the Io pæans are due to the strength of the rope. Had the poet Harriet ever shot the Sault Sainte Marie with a silent Indian in a birch shell, she might have beheld and chanted the “ savage faculty." But this immense misdirection of the force of an hundred or more men, deserves no lyric.

The Ibis was drawn through two rapids, and then the Captain of the Cataract appeared upon the shore, mounted on a donkey and surrounded by a staff or a council of ministers, similarly mole-eyed and grisly. I fancied, at first, the apparition was only a party of mummies donkeying along through the cataract, to visit some friendly Nubian mummies in the hills beyond. For the cataract is a kind

of "wolf's glen," and phantoms and grotesque ghosts of every kind are to be expected; but they slid off their beasts and shuffled down the sand slope to the shore and sprang aboard, helping up the most shriveled of mummies, who was presented to the Howadji as the father of the Captain of the Cataract, and it was clearly expected by the Captain and the crew that that fact would be recognized in a flowing horn of brandy, as partly discharging the world's debt to old grisly, for begetting that pilot and very Reis of very Reises

"Sing George the Third, and not the least in worth,
For graciously begetting George the Fourth."

The brandy was served, and the Howadji stepped ashore to visit Philæ, while the Ibis cleared the rest of the rapids and met them at Mahratta, the first Nubian village.

XXVII.

Labian Welcome.

"BUCKSHEESH HOWADJI-Buchsheesh Howadji,” welcomed us to Nubia. A group of naked little negroes with donkeys awaited us on the bank, and intoned the national hymn, "Alms, O Shopkeeper," as we mounted through the sand. The Howadji straddled the donkeys, for you do not mount a donkey more than you would a large dog, and sitting upon a thick cloth, the steed's only trapping, and nothing but the Howadji's nimble management of his legs to keep that on, away we went, helter skelter, over the sand-shamble, trot, canter, tumble, up again and ahead, jerking and shaking upon the little beasts, that balanced themselves along as if all four legs at once were necessary to support such terrible Howadji weights.

Away we dashed, scrambling along the bank. The sky cloudless-burning the sun-wild the waste shore. Ledges of rock lay buried in the sand, and at the head of the cataract, its Nubian mouth, a palm-shaded village. Fantastically frowning everywhere, the chaos of rock, and beyond and among, the river in shining armor, sinuous in the foaming struggle.

H

It was pure desert-a few patches of green grew miserable in the sand, forlorn as Christian pilgrims in Saracen Jerusalem. The bold formlessness of the cliffs allured the eye. Seen from the shore they are not high, but the mighty masses, irregularly strewn and heaped, crowding and concentrating upon the river, shrinking along the shores, yet strewn in the stream, and boldly buffeting its fury, are fascinatingly fantastic. Your eye, so long used to actual silence, and a sense of stillness in the forms and characters of the landscape, is unnaturally excited, and bounds restlessly from rock to river, as if it had surprised Nature in a move, and should see sudden and startling changes. The Howadji has caught her in this outlawed corner before her arrangments were completed. She is setting up the furniture of her scenery. This rock is surely to be shifted there, and that point to be swept away, here. There is intense expectation. Ah! if the Howadji had not traveled in vain, but should really see something and understand the secret significance of cataracts!

But a sudden donkey-quake wrecked all speculation, and like a tower shaken, but recovering itself from falling, the Howadji allowed the quake to "reel unheededly away," and alighted quietly upon his left leg, while the liberated donkey smelt about for food in the sand, like an ass. The soaring speculations of the moment upon the text of the prospect, had made the Howadji too unmindful that the nimble clinging of his legs to the donkey's ribs was the sole belly-band of his cloth and warrant of his seat; so the three went suddenly asunder, donkey, Howadji and cloth,