512 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

at Thebes is registered ; and if I left with pain, and the vast regret we feel on turning away from such spots, at least I took with me the joy that Thebes, the mighty and the eternal, was greater to me in its living reality than it had ever been in all the shadow-pictures my anticipation had drawn. Nor did the faultless pillars of the Memnonium, nor the obelisks of Karnak, take away my delight in the humbler objects which kept a recognition for me. The horses, whose desert blood sent its contagion into mine ; the lame water-boy, always at my elbow with his earthen bottle ; the grave guides, who considered my smattering of Arabic as something miraculous, and thence dubbed me " Taylor Effendi ; " the half-naked Fellahs in the harvest-fields, who remembered some idle joke of mine, — all these combined to touch the great landscape with a home-like influence, and to make it seem, in some wise, like an old resting-place of my heart. Mustapha Achmet Aga, the English agent at Luxor, had a great deal to tell me of the squabbles of travellers during the winter : how the beach was lined with foreign boats and the temples crowded day after day with scores of visitors ; how these quarrelled with their dragomen and those with their boatmen, and the latter with each other till I thanked Heaven for having kept me away from Thebes at such a riotous period.

Towards evening there was a complete calm, and every thing was so favorable for our downward voyage that I declined Mustapha's invitation to dine with him the next day, and set off for Kenneh. The sailors rowed lustily, my servant Ali taking the leading oar. Ali was beside himself with joy, at the prospect of reaching his home and astonishing his family with his marvellous adventures in Soudan. He led the chorus