less bucksheesh, will pull you, breathless and angry, to the summit, and promise to run up and over all possible pyramids, and for aught you know, throw you across to the peaks of the Saccara cousins. Only threats most terrible, and entirely impossible of performance, can restore the necessary silence. Express distinctly your determination to plunge every Bedoueen down the pyramid, when they have you dizzy and breathless and gasping on the sides as you go up from layer to layer, like stairs-swear horribly in your gasping and rage, that you will only begin by throwing them down, but conclude by annihilating the whole tribe who haunt the pyramids, and you work a miracle. For the Bedoueen become as placidly silent as if your threats were feasible, and only mutter inildly, "Bucksheesh, Howadji," like retiring and innocent thunder.

There are, also, who explore the pyramids: who, from poetic or other motives, go into an utterly dark, hot and noisome interior, see a broken sarcophagus, feel that they are encased in solid masonry of some rods from the air, hear the howls of Bedoueen, and smell their odors, and return faint, exhausted, smoke-blackened, with their pockets picked, and their nerves direfully disturbed. Poet Harriet advises none but firmly-nerved ladies to venture, and the Howadji may add the same advice to all but firmly-nerved men. To such, the exploration of the pyramids may be as it was to Nero-a grand and memorable epoch in life. For he said that he felt the greatness of old Egypt, more profoundly in the pyramids than anywhere else.

Yet you must seek the pyramids, else would you miss the Sphinx, and that memory of omission would more sadly haunt you afterward, than her riddle haunted the old victims of her spells.

The desert is too enamored of his grotesque darling, and gradually gathers around it, and draws it back again to his bosom. For it well seems the child of desert inspiration. Intense oriental imagination musing over the wonderful waste, would build its dreams in shapes as singular. It lies on the very edge of the desert, which recoils above the plain as at Saccara. The sand has covered it, and only head, neck and back are above its level. In vain Caviglia strove to stay the desert. More than half of the sand that he daily excavated, blew back again at night.

came.

The Sphinx, with raised head, gazes expectantly toward the East, nor dropped its eyes when Cambyses or Napoleon The nose is gone, and the lips are gradually going. The constant attrition of sand grains wears them away. The back is a mass of rock, and the temple between the fore-paws is buried forever. Still unread is my riddle, it seems to say, and looks, untiring, for him who shall solve it. Its beauty is more Nubian than Egyptian, or is rather a blending of both. Its bland gaze is serious and sweet. Yet unwinking, unbending, in the yellow moonlight silence of those desert sands, will it breathe mysteries more magical and rarer romances of the Mountains of the Moon and the Nile sources, than ever Arabian imagination dreamed. Be glad that the Sphinx was your last wonder upon the Nile, for it seemed to contain and express the rest. And

from its thinned and thinning lips, as you move back to the river with all Egypt behind you, trails a voice inaudible, like a serpent gorgeously folding about your memory -Egypt and mystery, O Sphinx!

XLVII.

Sunset.

"Tired with the pomp of their Osirean feast."

"WITH all Egypt behind you,"-so donkeyed the Howadji from the Sphinx and the silence of the desert. They reached the shore and stepped upon the boat while the sun was wreaking all his glory upon the west. It burned through the trees and over the little town of Ghizeh, and its people and filth, and as we moved into the stream, the pyramids occupied the west, unhurt for that seeing, large and eternal as ever, with the old mystery-the old charm.

The river was full of boats, in the vicinity of the city. The wind blew gently from the north, and fleets of sails were stretching whitely southward. Even some Howadji were just dotting down their first Nile notes, and we, mariners of two months, felt old and mature as we watched them. Had we not worshiped at Aboo Simbel and conquered the cataract, and heard Memnon, and stood on Memphis?

Back in that sunset came thronging the fairest images of the Nile; and may sweet Athor, lovely Lady of the West, enable you, retiring reader, to stand looking backward over

these pages, like the figure with which the Howadji's artist friend has graced this book's beginning, and behold a palmtree, or a rosy pyramid, or Memnon, or a gleam of sunshine brighter than our American wont, or the graceful Ghawazee beauty that the voyager so pleasantly remembers.

-And you, Italian Nera, who ask if the sherbet of roses was indeed poured in a fountained kiosk of Damascus, you know that Hafiz long since sang to us, how sad were the sunset, were we not sure of a morrow.