EVENING ON THE NILE. 239 and remained so for two or three hours. During the afternoon, I lay stretched on my carpet on the deck, looking through half-closed eyes on the glittering river and his banks.

The western shore was one long bower of Paradise — so green, so bright, so heaped with the deep, cool foliage of majestic sycamores and endless clusters of palms. I had seen no such beautiful palms since leaving Minyeh, in Lower Egypt.

There they were taller, but had not the exceeding richness and glory of these. The sun shone hot in a cloudless blue heaven, and the air was of a glassy, burning clearness, like that which dwells in the inmost heart of fire. The colors of the landscape were as if enamelled on gold, so intense, so glowing in their intoxicating depth and splendor. When, at last, the wind fell — except a breeze just strong enough to shake the creamy odor out of the purple bean-blossoms — and the sun went down in a bed of pale orange light, the moon came up the other side of heaven, a broad disc of yellow fire, and bridged the glassy Nile with her beams.

At such times, I selected a pleasant spot on the western bank of the river, where the palms were loftiest and most thickly clustered, and had the boat moored to the shore.

Achmet then spread my carpet and piled my cushions on the shelving bank of white sand, at the foot of the trees, where, as I lay, I could see the long, feathery leaves high above my head, and at the same time look upon the broad wake of the moon, as she rose beyond the Nile. The sand was as fine and soft as a bed of down, and retained an agreeable warmth from the sunshine which had lain upon it all day. As we rarely halted near a village, there was no sound to disturb the balmy repose of the scene, except, now and then, the whine of a jackal