Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes,
shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the sands
until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line against the sky.
Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand, and that of Seti
in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook & Son flourishes,
there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and pulverised beyond all
possible redemption. But they give us pause, these disappearing ruins,
for they are the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps the head of
the god, the debris of the tombs of the Middle and Ancient Empires, and
they indicate still the wide extent and development of the necropoles
of Abydos, so old that it almost makes one giddy to think of their
beginning.

Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs of the Egyptians are met
with only amongst the sands and the parched rocks. The great ancestral
people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the corruption
of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the midst of
this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call the desert.

*****

And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin drivers, is
being driven in the direction of the adjacent temple, dedicated to the
god by Seti! The luncheon no doubt is over and the band about to depart,
sharp to the appointed hour of the programme. Let us watch them from a
prudent distance.

To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, these Cooks and
Cookesses, and opening, not without a conscious air of majesty, their