We mounted and rode away; two imps of darkness following at the heels of our camels and Salame performing the part of body-guard. Thus attended, we found ourselves pitched, swung and rolled along at a pace that carried us rapidly up the slope, past a suburb full of cafés and grinning dancing-girls and out into the desert. Our way for the first half-mile or so lay among tombs. A great Mohammedan necropolis, part ancient, part modern, lies behind Assûan and covers more ground than the town itself. Some scores of tiny mosques, each topped by its little cupola and all more or less dilapidated, stand here amid a wilderness of scattered tombstones. Some are isolated; some grouped picturesquely together. Each covers, or is supposed to cover, the grave of a Moslem santon; but some are mere commemorative chapels dedicated to saints and martyrs elsewhere buried. Of simple headstones defaced, shattered, overturned, propped back to back on cairns of loose stones, or piled in broken and dishonored heaps, there must be many hundreds. They are for the most part rounded at the top like ancient Egyptian stelæ and bear elaborately carved inscriptions, some of which are in the Cufic character and more than a thousand years old. Seen when the sun is bending westward and the shadows are lengthening, there is something curiously melancholy and picturesque about this city of the dead in the dead desert. Leaving the tombs, we now strike off toward the left, bound for the obelisk in the quarry, which is the stock sight of the place. The horizon beyond Assûan is bounded on all sides by rocky heights, bold and picturesque in form, yet scarcely lofty enough to deserve the name of mountains. The sandy bottom under our camel’s feet is strewn with small pebbles and tolerably firm. Clustered rocks of black and red granite profusely inscribed with hieroglyphed records crop up here and there and serve as landmarks just where landmarks are needed. For nothing would be easier than to miss one’s way among these tawny slopes and to go wandering off, like lost Israelites, into the desert. Winding in and out among undulating hillocks and tracts of rolled bowlders, we come at last to a little group of cliffs, at the foot of which our camels halt unbidden. Here we dismount, climb a short slope and find the huge monolith at our feet.