488 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

a huge wall of rock before me, against which six enormous statues leaned as they looked from deep niches cut in its front.

Their solemn faces were touched by the moon, which shone full on the cliff, and only their feet were wrapped in shadow.

The lines of deep-cut hieroglyphics over the portal of this rocky temple were also filled with shadow and painted legibly on the gray, moonlit rock. Below them yawned the door — a square of complete darkness. A little to the left, over a long drift of sand that sloped from the summit of the cliff nearly to the water's edge, peered the mitred head of a statue of still more colossal proportions. I gazed on this broad, dim, and wonderful picture for a moment, so awed by its majesty that I did not ask myself where nor what it was. This is some grand Egyptian dream, was my first thought, and I closed my eyes for a few seconds, to see whether it would vanish. But it stood fast and silent as ever, and I knew it to be Abou-Simbel. My servants all slept, and the rais and boys noiselessly moored the boat to the shore, and then lay down and slept also. Still I lay, and the great statues looked solemnly down upon me, and the moon painted their kingly nomens and banners with yet darker distinctness on the gray rock. The river made no sound below, the long grass stirred not a blade at the foot of the crags, and the slopes of sand were white and dumb as snow. I lay in too deep a repose for thought, and was not then conscious how grateful was such a silence in Nature, while the moon held up that picture before me. It might have been two minutes or twenty, before the current slowly swung the stern of the boat around, and the picture as slowly shifted from my view, leaving instead the Southern Cross iD jjts shrine of stars.