bloomy clefts.  The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever describe them?  Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds make upon them?  It is an enchanted royaume of the sands through which one approaches Isis.

Isis and engineers!  We English people have effected that curious introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it.  We have presented Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Philae, and they have given her a gift:  a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which tourists go smiling on trolleys.  Isis has her expensive tribute—­it cost about a million and a half pounds—­and no doubt she ought to be gratified.

Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the walls of Egyptian tombs.  And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about her, and make their plaint with hers—­their plaint for the peace that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the “Holy Island.”

I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae.  I had sweet memories of the island that had been with me for many years—­memories of still mornings under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands; memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from the lifted hands of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island and the river; memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of the great spaces, under the brilliant stars.  I was afraid, because I could not believe the asservations of certain practical persons, full of the hard and almost angry desire of “Progress,” that no harm had been done by the creation of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary, it had benefited the temple.  The action of the water upon the stone, they said with vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and consolidate it.  Here I should like to lie, but I resist the temptation.  Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly the English engineers have helped to prolong the lives of the buildings of Philae, and Monsieur Maspero has declared that “the state of the temple of Philae becomes continually more satisfactory.”  So be it!  Longevity has been, by a happy chance, secured.  But what of beauty?  What of the beauty of the past, and what of the schemes for the future?  Is Philae even to be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised still higher, until Philae ceases to be?  Soon, no doubt, an answer will be given.