Still bent on buying baskets, if baskets were to be bought--bent also on finding out the whereabouts of a certain rock-cut temple which our books told us to look for at the back of the town, we turned aside into a straggling street leading toward the desert. The houses looked better built than usual; some pains having evidently been bestowed in smoothing the surface of the mud and ornamenting the doorways with fragments of colored pottery. A cracked willow-pattern dinner-plate set, like a fanlight, over one, and a white soup-plate over another, came doubtless from the canteen of some English dahabeeyah, and were the pride of their possessors. Looking from end to end of this street--and it was a tolerably long one, with the Nile at one end and the desert at the other--we saw no sign or shadow of moving creature. Only one young woman, hearing strange voices talking a strange tongue, peeped out suddenly from a half-opened door as we went by; then, seeing me look at the baby in her arms (which was hideous and had sore eyes), drew her veil across its face and darted back again. She thought I coveted her treasure and she dreaded the Evil Eye. All at once we heard a sound like the far-off quivering cry of many owls. It shrilled--swelled--wavered--dropped--then died away, like the moaning of the wind at sea. We held our breath and listened. We had never heard anything so wild and plaintive. Then suddenly, through an opening between the houses, we saw a great crowd on a space of rising ground about a quarter of a mile away. This crowd consisted of men only--a close, turbaned mass some three or four hundred in number; all standing quite still and silent; all looking in the same direction. Hurrying on to the desert we saw the strange sight at which they were looking. The scene was a barren sand-slope hemmed in between the town and the cliffs and dotted over with graves. The actors were all women. Huddled together under a long wall some few hundred yards away, bareheaded and exposed to the blaze of the morning sun, they outnumbered the men by a full third. Some were sitting, some standing; while in their midst, pressing round a young woman who seemed to act as leader, there swayed and circled and shuffled a compact phalanx of dancers. Upon this young woman the eyes of all were turned. A black Cassandra, she rocked her body from side to side, clapped her hands above her head and poured forth a wild declamatory chant which the rest echoed. This chant seemed to be divided into strophes, at the end of each of which she paused, beat her breast, and broke into that terrible wail that we had heard just now from a distance. Her brother, it seemed, had died last night; and we were witnessing his funeral. The actual interment was over by the time we reached the spot; but four men were still busy filling the grave with sand, which they scraped up, a bowlful at a time, and stamped down with their naked feet.