Kum Ombos, El Kab-names of note and marks of memory. Men dwell in tombs still, and came out to offer us all kinds of trinkets and gay wares. Then upon dog-like donkeys we rode with feet dangling on the ground, across the green plain of the valley to the Arabian desert, whose line is as distinctly and straightly marked along the green, as the sea line along the shore. The cultivated plain does not gradually die away through deeper and more sandy barrenness into the desert, but it strikes it with a shock, and ends suddenly; and the wide-waving corn and yellow cotton grow on the edge of the sand, like a hedge. The Howadji, embarked in his little cockle-boat of a donkey, puts out to desert as little boats to sea, and scrambling up the steep sand-sides of the first hills, sees upon the grottowalls of El Kab much of the cotemporary history of the life and manners of antique Egypt. The details of social customs and the habits of individual life are painted upon the walls, so that the peculiar profession of the occupant of the tomb can be easily determined. But let us cling to the sunshine as long as possible, for we shall explore tombs and darkness enough at Thebes.

XXXV.

Cleopatra.

"ANT. Most sweet Queen."

A VOLUPTUOUS morning awakened the Howadji under the shore at Erment. Cloudless the sky as Cleopatra's eyes, when they looked on Cæsar. Warmly rosy the azure that domed the world, as if to-day it were a temple dedicate to beauty. And stepping ashore, to the altars of beauty we repaired. No sacrificial, snowy lambs, no garlands of gorgeous flowers, did the worship require. The day itself was flower and feast and triumphal song. The day itself lingered luminously along the far mountain ranges, paling in brilliance and over the golden green of the spacious plain, that was a flower-enameled pavement this morning, for our treading, as if unceasingly to remind us that we went as worshipers of beauty only, and the fame of beauty that fills the world.

The Howadji confesses that no Egyptian morning is more memorable to him than this, for nothing Egyptian is so cognate to our warm-blooded human sympathy as the rich romance of Cleopatra and her Roman lovers. After the austere impression of the elder Egyptian monu

ments, this simply human and lovely association was greatly fascinating. Ramses to-day was not great. He subdued Babylon, but Cleopatra conquered Julius Cæsar. Marc Antony called his Cleopatra-children, kings of kings. The conqueror of the conqueror was the divinity of the day.

I know not if it were the magic of the morning, but the world to-day was Cleopatra. Hers was the spirit of the air, the lines of the landscape. In any land the same day would have suggested her perpetually to the imagination-for there are Greek and Roman days, Italian and Sicilian, Syrian and African. And these days correspond in character with the suggestion they make. Many and many a day had the Howadji seen and loved the serpent of old Nile, before he beheld Africa, many a long June day had been tranced in Italy in the Fornarina's spell, many a twilight had lingered along Galilean heights with him to whom the Syrens of the Syrian sky, Love and Pleasure and Ambition, sang in vain, and that long before he had trod the broad silent way of waters, that leads the Western to them, and which keeps them forever cool and consecrate in his imagination. These dreams, or realities of feeling, were not occasioned by pictures or poems, but were the sentiment of the day. The soul seems then sen suously to apprehend the intensity of emotion that is symbolized. And when you travel into the lands of which you read and dreamed, you will be touched with your want of surprise in their delights. But many an unheeded silent strain of sunshine, or night-appalling tempest, had sung

and thundered their sacred secret to your mind. The day, therefore, was so much Cleopatra, that only the fairest fate could have drifted us upon that morning to the shore of Erment.

The forms and hues of old Egypt were vague and pale in the presence of this modern remembrance. I confess that the erudite Sir Gardiner, and the Poet Martineau, do not very lovingly linger around Erment. I confess their facts.

The temple is of the very last genuine Egyptian days, the child of the dotage of Egyptian art, when it was diseased and corrupted by Roman prostitution. The antique grandeur is gone. It is the remains of an interreg. num between the old and the new-the faint death-strug. gle of an expiring art, or if the insatiable poets demand, a galvanized quiver after death. All that, if the erudite and the antiquarian require. Here is no architectural, no theological or mystical-romantically historical and very dubiously moral (after the Bunyan standard) interest. This is the hieroglyph that might balk Champollion, yet which the merest American Howadji might read as he ran.

For what boots it? Is not Cleopatra a radiant, the only radiant image, in our Egyptian annals? Are we humanly related to Menmôphth, or any Amunoph? Are not the periods of history epically poetic that treat of her, while they grope and reel seeking Thothmes and Amun in the dark? Besides, Cleopatra sat glorious in beauty upon Ramses' throne, and the older thrones are, the more venerable are they. And if the great darling of Amun Re heroically held his heritage, grant that the child of Venus

well lost it, melting the pearl of her inheritance in the glowing wine of her love.

Neocesar should have been a God's darling, and so have died young. And that he might have been, but for the whim of Nature, who will not give the fairest blossoms to the noblest trees. As if she were a housewife upon allowance, and had not illimitable capacity of mating beauty with power wherever they meet. But in this temple of Erment we will not reproach her. For Nature satisfied the Ideal in giving Cleopatra to Cæsar.

Such, I suppose to have been the ox-necked Abdallah's musings as he stumbled up the steep bank from the junk, bearing the torch crate, for all Egyptian temples require great light to be thrown upon the interior darkness of their Adyta or holy of holies, and skeptical Howadji suspect that the dog-faithful Abdallah did it more satisfactorily than the priests, who, ex-officio, were the intellectual lanterns of old Egypt.

Sundry shapeless heaps of dingy blanket strewn upon the wind-sheltered, sun-flooded bank were the crew. They had diligently rowed all night, and had crept ashore to sleep. They too had reason to bless the "most sweet Queen," and we left them, honoring the day and its divinity in their own way.

The picture of that morning is permanent. Like all Egyptian pictures composed of a few grand outlines, a few graceful details, but charged, brimming, transfigured with light, and brooding over all, the profound repose of the azure sky-which does not seem to be an arch so much