A Nile Journal

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Asyoot, December 2d. A day. of delights. Most faultless weather, in which repose and activity can be equally enjoyed, and we had both in perfection. Asyoot is by far the prettiest city we have seen; so neat and shapely, stately with its seventeen minarets, and with a little suburb of domes and frost-like...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Asyoot, December 2d. A day. of delights. Most faultless weather, in which repose and activity can be equally enjoyed, and we had both in perfection. Asyoot is by far the prettiest city we have seen; so neat and shapely, stately with its seventeen minarets, and with a little suburb of domes and frost-like tracery, and superb palms, as if it were a poem by some Arabian poet. Our first thought was for the tombs in the cliffs overlooking the town, which were to be our first interview with Egyptian sculpture in site. A fine lot of little donkeys with their fruity saddles, like monstrous dates, and as usual, I found a countryman in my donkey. Yankee Dood seems ubiquitous in Egypt, and generally is a pretty good beast. The road was wonderfully good, and after a little trotting and galloping, in less than an hour we found ourselves at the tombs of Lycopolis. It must have come hard to make a deity outof that scoundrel?the wolf; but the old Egyptians apparently accepted the deity as the author of evil as well as good, ?all life indeed being a part of himself, for had we not just before swept under the high chambers of the mummied crocodiles of Beni Hassan ? But we saw no signs of the wolf, nor a mummy of any sort, only great doorways to mysterious tombs, on which were cut gigantic forms of kings, and processions of figures and animals. This first sight of Egyptian work was very impressive. This intaglio, as they use it, expresses with great purity of form and line something of modelling and expression which we had not expected. We saw birds and beasts delicately cut, which we instantly recognised; they had something of that naif directness of intention which gives the charm to Japanese drawings. They evidently, like the Japanese, loved the outline, and as the Japanese shirk the imitat...