THEBES REVISITED. 511 siiould I see but my former guide, Hassan, leading down the beach the same little brown mare on which I had raced with him around Karnak. We mounted and rode again down the now familiar road, but the harvests whose planting I had witnessed in December were standing ripe or already gathered in.

It was autumn in Egypt. The broad rings of clay were beaten for threshing floors, and camels, laden with stacks of wheat-sheaves paced slowly towards them over the stubble fields. Herds of donkeys were to be seen constantly, carrying heavy sacks of wheat to the magazines, and the capacious freight-boats were gathering at the towns along the Nile to carry off the winter's produce.

It was a bright, warm and quiet day that I spent at Thebes. The great plain, girdled by its three mountainchains, lay in a sublime repose. There was no traveller there, and, as the people were expecting none, they had already given up the ruins to their summer silence and loneliness. I had no company, on either side of the river, but my former guides, who had now become as old friends. We rode to Karnak, to Medeenet Abou, to the Memnonium, and the Colossi of the Plain. The ruins had now not only a memory for me, but a language. They no longer crushed me with their cold, stern, incomprehensible grandeur. I was calm as the Sphinx, whose lips no longer closed on a mystery. I had gotten over the awe of a neophyte, and, though so little had been revealed to me, walked among the temples with the feelings of a master.

Let no one condemn this expression as presumptuous, for nothing is so simple as Art, when once we have the clue to her infinite meanings.

White among the many white days of my travel, that day