CAIRO TO KISUMU the tombs of the kings and explained the symbols and pic¬ tures on the walls. I went to that part of the valley where the excavation is now going on and took pictures of a gang of one hundred and fifty Egyptian men and boys who are working there.

Let me describe the place that the ancient Egyptian monarchs selected for their burials, the Valley of the Kings. They wanted to hide their remains so that pos¬ terity could never find them, and to cover them so that future generations would have no idea that they and their treasures lay beneath. Our cemeteries are chosen for the beauty of their surroundings. We like to turn up our toes to the daisies and to have leafy trees whisper a re¬ quiem over our heads. The old Egyptian kings wanted to lie under the sterile desert waste and chose a region about as far up the Nile valley as Cleveland is inland from the Atlantic, and fully six miles back from the fertile strip on which their people lived. I can imagine no place more dreary. At this point the Nile is walled on the west by limestone mountains. As far as the moisture reaches, the valley is the greenest of green, but beyond lies a desert as brown as any part of the Sahara. There is not a blade of grass, nor a sprig of vegetation of any kind. There is nothing but sand and arid mountains, the latter almost as ragged in outline as the wildest parts of the Rockies. Some of their stony sides are built up in great precipices while in other places there are fort-like bluffs and similar convulsions of nature.

To visit this valley one first comes to Luxor, which is very nearly on the site of Old Thebes, the capital of Egypt in the days of its most brilliant past. The ancient city lay on both sides of the Nile, but Luxor is on the east bank.

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