broad beautiful bay beyond, the thin lines of masts were drawn dark against the sky. Palms, and the dim lines of Arabian hills dreamed in the tranquil air, a few boats clung to the western bank, that descended in easy clay terraces to the water, their sails hanging in the dying wind. Suddenly we were among them, close under the bank.

The moon sloped westward behind a group of palms, and the spell was upon us. We had drifted into the dream world. From the ghostly highlands and the low shore, came the baying of dogs, mellowed by distance and the moonlight into the weird measures of a black forest hunting. Drifted away from the world, yet, like Ferdinand, moved by voiceless music in the moonlight.

"Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands

Curtsied when you have, and list,

(The wild waves whist,)

Foot it featly here and there,

And sweet sprites the burden bear.
Hark, hark!

The watch-dog's bark."

Such aerial witchery was in the night, for our Shakspeare was a Nile necromancer as well. Drifted beyond the world, yet not beyond the Poet. Flutes, too, were blown upon the shore, and horns and the chorus of a crew came sadly across the water with the faint throb of the tarabuka. Under those warm southern stars, was a sense of solitude and isolation. Might we not even behold the

?

southern cross, when the clouds of Latakia rolled away Our own crew were silent, but a belated boat struggling for a berth among our fleet, disturbed the slumbers of a neighboring crew. One sharp, fierce cackle of dispute suddenly shattered the silence like a tropical whirlwind, nor was it stiller by the blows mutually bestowed. Our chat of Bagdad and the desert was for a moment suspended. Nor did we wonder at the struggle, since Mars shone so redly over. But it died away as suddenly, and inexplicably mournful as the sphinx's smile, streamed the setting moonlight over the world. Not a ripple of Western feeling reached that repose. We were in the dream of the death of the deadest land.

VII.

The Landscape.

THE Nile landscape is not monotonous, although of one general character. In that soft air the lines change constantly, but imperceptibly, and are always so delicately lined and drawn, that the eye swims satisfied along the warm tranquillity of the scenery.

Egypt is the valley of the Nile. At its widest part it is, perhaps, six or seven miles broad, and is walled upon the west by the Libyan mountains, and upon the east by the Arabian. The scenery is simple and grand. The forms of the landscape harmonize with the forms of the impression of Egypt in the mind. Solemn and still and inexplicable sits that antique mystery among the flowery fancies and broad green fertile feelings of your mind and contemporary life, as the sphinx sits upon the edge of the grain-green plain. No scenery is grander in its impression, for none is so symbolical. The land seems to have died with the race that made it famous-it is so solemnly still. Day after day unrolls to the eye the perpetual panorama of fields wide-waving with the tobacco, and glittering with the golden-blossomed cotton, among which half

naked men and women are lazily working. Palm-groves stand, each palm a poem, brimming your memory with beauty. You know from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, whose volumes are here your best tutor, that you are passing the remains of ancient cities, as the Ibis loiters languidly before the rising and falling north wind, or is wearily drawn along by the crew filing along the shore. An occasional irregular reach of mounds and a bit of crumbling wall distract imagination as much with the future as the past, straining to realize the time when New York shall be an irregular reach of mounds, or a bit of crumbling wall.

Impossible? Possibly. But are we so loved of time, we petted youngest child, that the fate of his eldest gorgeous Asia, and Africa, its swart mysterious twin shall only frown at us through them and fly?

The austere Arabian mountains leave Cairo with us, and stretch in sad monotony of strength along the Eastern shore. There they shine sandily, the mighty advanced guard of the desert. "Here," say they, and plant their stern feet forever, and over their shoulders sweep and sing the low wild winds from mid Arabia, "sand-grains outnumbering all thy dear drops of water are behind us, to maintain our might and subdue thee, fond, fair river!"

But it glides unheeded at their base, lithely swinging its long unbroken phalanx of sweet water-waving gently against the immovable cliffs like palm branches of peace against a foe's serried front.

Presently the Libyan heights appear, and the river is invested. A sense of fate then spells you, and you feel

that the two powers must measure their might at last, and go forward to the cataract with the feeling of one who shall behold terrible battles.

Yet the day, mindful only of beauty, lavishes all its light upon the mighty foes, adorning them each impartially for its own delight. Along the uniform Arabian highland, it swims and flashes, and fades in exquisite hues, magically making it the sapphire wall of that garden of imagination, which fertile Arabia is; or in the full gush of noon standing it along the eastern horizon as an image of those boundless deserts, which no man can conceive, more than the sea, until he beholds them.

But the advancing desert consumes cities of the river, so that fair fames of eldest history are now mere names. Even the perplexed river sweeps away its own, but reveals richer reaches of green land for the old lost, and Arabia and Lybia are foiled forever. Forever, for it must be as it has been, until the fertility of the tropics that floats seaward in the Nile, making the land of Egypt as it goes, is exhausted in its source.

But there is a profounder charm in the landscape, a beauty that grows more slowly into the mind, but is as perfect and permanent. Gradually the Howadji perceives the harmony of the epical, primitive, and grand character of the landscape, and the austere simplicity of the Egyptian art. Fresh from the galleries of Europe, it is not without awe that he glides far behind our known beginnings of civilization, and standing among its primeval forms, realizes the relation of nature and art.