detail that fills it.  None but devils could think of etching every rock outcrop with wind-lines, or skinning it down to its glistening nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town-suburbs; of covering the space of half an English county with sepia studies of interlacing and recrossing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition of much too clever perspective; and of wiping out the half-finished work with a wash of sand in three tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on the horizon’s edge.  This they do in order to make lost travellers think they can recognise landmarks and run about identifying them till the madness comes.  The Desert is all devil-device—­as you might say ’blasted cleverness’—­crammed with futile works, always promising something fresh round the next corner, always leading out through heaped decoration and over-insistent design into equal barrenness.

There was a morning of mornings when we lay opposite the rock-hewn Temple of Abu Simbel, where four great figures, each sixty feet high, sit with their hands on their knees waiting for Judgment Day.  At their feet is a little breadth of blue-green crop; they seem to hold back all the weight of the Desert behind them, which, none the less, lips over at one side in a cataract of vividest orange sand.  The tourist is recommended to see the sunrise here, either from within the temple where it falls on a certain altar erected by Rameses in his own honour, or from without where another Power takes charge.

The stars had paled when we began our watch; the river birds were just whispering over their toilettes in the uncertain purplish light.  Then the river dimmered up like pewter; the line of the ridge behind the Temple showed itself against a milkiness in the sky; one felt rather than saw that there were four figures in the pit of gloom below it.  These blocked themselves out, huge enough, but without any special terror, while the glorious ritual of the Eastern dawn went forward.  Some reed of the bank revealed itself by reflection, black on silver; arched wings flapped and jarred the still water to splintered glass; the desert ridge turned to topaz, and the four figures stood clear, yet without shadowing, from their background.  The stronger light flooded them red from head to foot, and they became alive—­as horridly and tensely yet blindly alive as pinioned men in the death-chair before the current is switched on.  One felt that if by any miracle the dawn could be delayed a second longer, they would tear themselves free, and leap forth to heaven knows what sort of vengeance.  But that instant the full sun pinned them in their places—­nothing more than statues slashed with light and shadow—­and another day got to work.

A few yards to the left of the great images, close to the statue of an Egyptian princess, whose face was the very face of ‘She,’ there was a marble slab over the grave of an English officer killed in a fight against dervishes nearly a generation ago.