After the abundant dews of the night came the delight of the cool-warm summer day. The clustering trees now pressed their way forward more richly and luxuriously along the banks of the Nile. Here, on the Libyan side, lay the town of Acanthus, with its temple of Osiris in a spreading wood of Theban acanthus-trees, of which the natives tap the fragrant gums. Next, on the Arabian bank, came Aphroditopolis, the second town of the name, with the temple of the White Cow; and then the travellers reached the Heracleotic nome, a big island in the Nile, from which a canal cuts through the Arsinoic nome, the most fertile in the whole country. Here and here alone the olive-tree flourished in dense, silvery woods; but here also there twisted and twined, in close festoons, the vine-branches, on which the grapes were beginning to swell; here the fruit-trees bent under their heavy load and the orchards stretched; here the sickles of the husbandmen waved through the abundant ears of corn. Here the fat soil yielded wealth and prosperity; here the innumerable sheep spread in a wave of wool over the hills, like a shadowy white sea. Here, between margins of sands, Lake Moeris stretched exquisite and crystal blue to the horizon, as it were a fresh-water inland sea. In earlier ages, the ocean must have extended to those margins and stolen the whole northern land of Lower Egypt, that gift of the Nile, as Herodotus had called it long ago. Here the double lotus-flowers were trained to blossom in the waters; and here the sacred scarabs were bred and worshipped upon the white flowers.

Lucius would wander alone of a morning, strolling along the banks of the lake. It was so strangely calm here and so divinely beautiful; and a heaven-sent consolation filled the air. These were the regions blest by the gods; and it pleased Lucius to linger here. The thalamegus lay moored under acanthus-trees; the flowering reeds shot up to a man’s height around her. And every afternoon, at sunset, Lucius, sometimes accompanied by Thrasyllus, sometimes alone, walked to the labyrinth.

The road lay along the waterworks of the canal, where daily, under the supervision of the engineers, the quantity of water that flowed in and out of the lake through the canal was closely gauged. The tilled and inhabited lands around Lake Moeris, large as a sea, were never flooded. If the Nile increased, all that happened was that the blue crystal mirror of the lake rose. If the waters of the river fell, then those of the lake filled them up, by careful management of the sluices. The water was never other than a benevolent deity.

Along the waterworks ran the road to the labyrinth. In the sinking glory of the sun, in blood-red and orange splendours, Lucius saw it daily, the strange Titanic town of monoliths, the linked rows of palaces and courts, projecting their columns endlessly, endlessly, towards the sunlit horizon. Orange and blood-red gleams glowed over the flat stone tables of the roofs, which were not higher than a single pillared storey and which spread out their immense terrace like a paved desert. There were twenty palaces, each surrounded by twenty-seven monolithic columns; and all this wondrous architecture of past centuries was without a beam of wood, was without cement or masonry, was simply stone laid upon stone with faultless precision and column hewn beside column, absolutely circular, each column a single stone. At the end of the palaces, which were a stadium long, rose the square pyramid, the tomb of the builder, King Amenemha.

The holy place was guarded by priests, who led Lucius through the halls and crypts. The twenty palaces represented the former twenty Egyptian nomes, or provinces; and the emissaries of each province used to gather with their priests and priestesses in their palace or court and offer up sacrifices and discuss great questions of policy or local welfare. But nowadays the palaces were deserted, the crypts were deserted, and the priests led Lucius along endless, deserted, winding corridors which meandered from palace to palace. The torches smeared the walls with blood-red light, smeared the smooth stone walls of the corridors and halls and floors and ceilings, stone after stone upon stone of wonderful dimensions all resting one upon another without cement. And to Lucius it was one of the marvels of the world, even more marvellous, because of its sublime human architecture, than the pyramids had been.

Travelling on camels with Uncle Catullus and a great retinue, Lucius went a hundred stadia farther, to Arsinoe-Crocodilopolis. The trees flourished more richly, more luxuriantly, like a richly-wooded park around the travellers, till they came to the sacred lake where the sacred crocodile, named Such, was held in veneration.

“Well,” said Uncle Catullus, “here’s another of these little pets which are kept for the edification of foreigners!”

And in fact the priests who came to meet the travellers in front of the dromos of the sacred lake, surrounded on every side with pillars, first amiably demanded a stater a head as entrance-fee, while Caleb, of course, had seen to a supply of rich provisions, as an offering to the deity. The slaves carried baskets with cakes, roast meats and jars of hydromel.

In the lake lay Such, the huge monster; but the priests had tamed the terrible deity: they were luring him from the middle of the lake, where his temple was, to the bank, because some Persian visitors happened to have arrived before Lucius and wished to present their offerings. On the edge of the lake the priests took Such fearlessly by his terrible jaws and made him swallow the cakes and meat and wine of the Persian grandees, who were greatly diverted and laughed aloud.

“They must be great noblemen,” said Caleb, “and are going from the pillars of Sesostris to Alexandria, even as you, my noble lords, are going from Alexandria to the pillars of Sesostris. My lord, if you permit me, I should much like to exchange a few words with the guide of the Persian lords.”

Lucius gave his permission; and the crocodile, who had swallowed his Persian presents, swam back to the middle of the lake. But the priests now quickly lured him to the other side, where Lucius was waiting; and the ever greedy crocodile approached; and the priests again took him fearlessly by his terrible jaws and the monster now swallowed Lucius’ gifts, the cakes, the roast meat, as though insatiable; and the priests, laughing, emptied a jar of hydromel into his maw.

Meanwhile, Caleb, after a few words with the guide, had sunk in salaams before the Persian lords.

“He’s offering the Persians his diversorium,” said Uncle Catullus, jestingly.

And in fact Caleb, in a few minutes, came back happy and swaggering to his own travellers and said, in a mysterious whisper:

“I have recommended their Persian lordships to be sure to stop at the Hermes House at Alexandria; and I slipped a gold ptolemy into their guide’s hand. Yes, my lords, business is business; and, if we did no business at Alexandria, I could never hope to see my beloved Saba again. For there you must have done business, if you want to live in the country; there’s no business to be done there, my lords.”

By way of Heracleopolis, where divine honours were paid to the ichneumon, the spotted rat that devours the eggs of the adders and attacks the adders themselves, after first rolling itself in the mud, which dries round its body and forms an armour, the travellers reached Cynopolis, where the dog is worshipped as Anubis, and Oxyrynchus, where the fish of the name is venerated. And it now appeared that, in this region of Heptanomis, where, on the Arabian side of the Nile, the strange battlements of the blinding white Alabastrites Mountains blaze against the sky, all animals received divine honours, as though the priests had instituted these popular forms of worship in great numbers everywhere, so that they might the more carefully keep to themselves the secret Hermetic wisdom. Cats and falcons, sheep and wolves, baboons and zebus, eagles and lions, goats and spiders: all the animals were worshipped in one or other town or village; all the animals had their temples and priests; and Uncle Catullus said that he grew weary of having to admire so many sacred animals, especially as Apis, the little bull, and Such, the crocodile, were after all the only ones that were really interesting to see. But all these cattle, all these birds and fishes, all these creatures, from carnivora down to insects, were worshipped, tended, fed and shown in the temples to strangers, each time at a piece of gold a head. No, it was really too silly, especially when, after the first Crocodilopolis, on the left, the second Crocodilopolis appeared on the right, on the bank of the Nile, with another Such!

“Lucius,” said Uncle Catullus, “honestly, I’m not going to feed any more sacred crocodiles, nor any sacred goats or cats or beetles either. I’ve seen enough of all those pests, do you hear, nephew?”

And Lucius and Thrasyllus were inclined to agree with Uncle Catullus; and the barge sped past the wondrous purple of the Porphyrites Mountains, gold-ruddy crests in the orange evening sky, up to Ptolemais, the greatest town in the Thebais.

Ptolemais was a prosperous city, ruled like Alexandria by a municipal government founded on the Greek model; but after Ptolemais the travellers were especially charmed with Abydos. Here they saw the Memnonium, which was not so gigantic as the labyrinth, but which still was built of great single blocks of stone, according to that same marvellous system of lost ancient architecture. They also saw the underground well, which is reached by vaults and galleries, a subterranean miracle of monoliths, always fitted to one another and upon one another, without masonry. The temple of Apollo rose in a flowering acacia-wood, as in a sudden dream of swarming white, fragrant blossoms.

Lesser Diospolis and Tentyra followed. The Tentyrians worship Aphrodite and hunt the crocodile, which they destroy wherever they can; and Uncle Catullus said that they showed good taste in this civilized choice. After the half-Arabian Coptos and Apollonopolis, Thebes loomed into view, with its hundred gates, the gates which Homer sang, the gates through which two hundred warriors, with all their horses and chariots, could pass. And, as the travellers drew near, in the rosy dawn behind Thebes, the Smaragdis Hills appeared in green outline, transparent and far-away as a dream, through the misty light of the horizon.

Thebes was already called Greater Diospolis and worshipped Zeus-Jupiter.

“Heaven be praised!” said Uncle Catullus. “The Upper Egyptians are become sensible. Venus and Jupiter are once more held in honour! Every conceivable sort of crocodile, goat, dog, rat, falcon and beetle is done with. It was high time!”

Like Memphis, Thebes spread itself as an immense, ancient, but dying city. For eighty stadia along the Nile its ancient palaces and temples stood in an endless row, forsaken, ruined, cracking, slanting and sinking, with their pillars and walls, their mutilated colossi and sphinxes, their obelisks already fallen to the ground. Even in the sun, a grey melancholy spread over the great city, whose streets, indeed, were crowded with numbers of pedestrians, camels and litters, but without the feverish, metropolitan bustle which had reigned at Alexandria. The gloom of a fatally waning glory lay like a haze over all this architectural immensity, which Cambyses, with his Persian hordes, had in past ages destroyed beyond repair, as with gigantic hammer-strokes.

In the moonlit night the city, with its vast outlines, with its endless row of Titanic palaces, rose beside the Nile like a Titanic citadel, mysteriously chilling to the heart. In these abandoned temples the lost wisdom especially had been cultivated by the omniscient priests, the heirs of Moses and of Hermes Trismegistus. Here the utmost wisdom of philosophy and astronomy and astrology was known. Here the year and the day were calculated by the sun and no longer, as of yore, by the moon; here the year was divided into twelve months of thirty days, with five intercalary days; and here was calculated the time that must be added to the three hundred and sixty-five days in order to arrive at the exact length of the year. The kings who reigned here reigned, according to the hieroglyphs on the obelisks, over Scythia, Bactria, Ionia and India! They had ruled the world, in the deep-sunk centuries! In the measureless spaces of their immense palaces and temples, from which the Nile, flowing silver in the moonlight, could be seen through the rows of pylons gleaming as it had gleamed centuries ago, not an atom remained of the material or immaterial life of this long, long array of monarchs. Their names alone were still extant, written on cracking or mutilated obelisks, but their history lingered only in a few disputed legends. The unplumbed depth of the past made Lucius’ sensitive mind turn giddy. Yet, as he wandered by Thrasyllus’ side through the endless forsaken halls and rooms and courts, here dark with shadow, there lighted by the spectral moon, he was charmed by the sombre beauty and grandeur of that giddy depth.

Here, too, stood a monolithic memnonium. Next came, linked together, the forty royal tombs hewn in the rock. And, in front of this Titanic ruin, in which not a mummy remained, the travellers saw, in the moonlit night, the two seated colossi, themselves carved out of monoliths; but one, with the trunk broken off—by what power?—had fallen in the high grass, while the other still stared towards the east, in the hieratic attitude, the long hands upon the knees, the pschent crowning the vast, ecstatic head, with its huge, staring, sightless eyes, from which the enamel had disappeared and the jewelled pupils.

The travellers stood in silence before the statue in the moonlight; and even Uncle Catullus refrained from jesting. The atmosphere at this spot was woven of shimmering divinity. The moon was waning, the dawn was rising rose-red. And, as though with a human voice, a single note sounded from the statue. The note was intoned clearly and almost plaintively; it developed into the powerful sound of a man’s high voice, swelled into something terribly human and almost divine and broke off short and hard. They all heard it in the uncertain light: Lucius, Thrasyllus, Catullus, Caleb, Cora, all the slaves, male and female, who had accompanied the travellers. Caleb turned very pale and time after time pressed his lips to his amulets.

And, motionless and now silent, the blind colossus stared towards the sun, which was rising out of a sea of rosy beams and gold-dust cloud.

That evening, in the temple of Zeus-Jupiter-RÂ, the travellers saw the strange ceremony of the wedding of the Pallade, or Pallachide. She was the daughter of one of the greatest families of Diospolis and was chosen a month ago, for her birth and beauty, as the priestess of the god. She had served the god that month by giving her beauty to whomsoever she would. Now that the period of her service was past, she was marrying her bridegroom, a young man, like herself a member of one of the greatest and oldest Theban families. There was a ceremony of mourning and dirge because the service of so fair and famed a maiden was at an end; there was the presentation of gifts by all whom she had embraced that month; there was glad gaiety now because of her wedding. She was attired and anointed as a goddess and received great honour from the close-packed multitude; and after her wedding she kissed the priestess who succeeded her, likewise a virgin from one of the leading families of the town, and who was shown naked before the altar and was exquisitely beautiful as a child.

“Every country has its customs,” said Uncle Catullus, with a shrug. “I don’t envy the bridegroom; but no one seems to consider it odd; and the polite thing for us foreigners to do will be just to act as though we thought it all quite natural.”

And with Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb he approached the bride, who was now sparkling with jewels beside her bridegroom; and their slaves threw roses and lilies and lotus-flowers before her feet; and she thanked him with a silent, winning dignity, standing amid the circle of her kinsmen in a queenly attitude.

But, after Thebes, to Uncle Catullus’ despair, there reappeared on the banks of the Nile the towns at which crocodiles, fishes and falcons were worshipped.

“Lucius,” said Uncle Catullus to his nephew, seriously, one morning, while the barge was approaching Apollonopolis Magna, “Lucius, my dear boy, I have a confession to make to you. I think I’ve had enough of it. I’m sick of falcons, fishes and crocodiles which are gods, not to mention dogs, wolves, beetles, bulls and other cattle. And, in addition to being sick of all these sacred animals, I’m sick of all those strange Egyptian foodstuffs, while, moreover, I suspect Caleb of fortifying with barley-spirit the wines with which he supplies us out of his store; and this applies not only to the thick-as-ink Mareotis wine, but also to the topaz-yellow liqueurs of Napata.... Lucius, my dear boy, I am old and I feel ill. My head is like a sponge saturated not with water but with impressions of strange ceremonies and immoral customs. Also my stomach is overloaded and my palate over-excited. I have a craving for a few succulent oysters and a young roast peacock. I understand that one can’t get those here, on the Nile; but still I should like to learn what your plans really are ... I’ve heard something about hunting-expeditions and the pillars of Sesostris....”

“Yes, uncle,” said Lucius, with a smile, “Caleb did suggest that we should leave the barge at PhilÆ, where we shall soon be arriving, and go through Ethiopia with carts, camels, elephants and tents, go hunting on elephants and ostriches and travel over Napata and Meroe, through forest and wilderness, to Cape Dire and the pillars of Sesostris, where we shall find the quadrireme waiting for the homeward journey.”

“Well, my dear boy, I think that this programme, together with my spongy brain and overloaded stomach, would be too much for me. If I were to accomplish it by your side, then Egypt would certainly be the death of me, a contingency which I am dreading as it is. I think, don’t you, that I had better go down the Nile again in the barge, past all the sacred wolves and falcons and cats and beetles?”

But Caleb had approached:

“In that case, my noble Lord Catullus,” he said, “I have a much better plan. In fact, I, your humble, obedient servant, agree with you that the journey through Ethiopia would perhaps be very tiring for you. That is why I would propose that the thalamegus take you from Apollonopolis Magna, by the canal, to Berenice, on the Bay of Acathantus, in the Arabian Gulf.1 At Berenice you will meet the quadrireme, which has gone by Pelusium and the Nechao Canal2 and is ascending the Arabian Gulf to fetch us at the pillars of Sesostris. In this way you will do the journey without inconvenience and yet with enjoyment, for the Berenice Canal passes along the Smaragdis Mountains and they are a dream, my lord; my lord, they’re a dream!...”

Thus did Caleb advise him, reflecting that, if Uncle Catullus adopted this programme, instead of going back to Alexandria, the princely apartments at the Hermes House would remain unoccupied and could be let to the Persian grandees who had fed the sacred Such on Lake Moeris and who were travelling in the opposite direction to his own noble clients....