There are some rock-cut tombs in the face of the cliffs close by. The painter explored them while the writer sketched the interior of the temple; but he reported of them as mere sepulchers, unpainted and unsculptured. The rocks, the sands, the sky, were at a white heat when we again turned our faces toward the river. Where there had so lately been a great multitude there was now not a soul. The palms nodded; the pigeons dozed; the mud town slept in the sun. Even the mother had gone from her place of weeping and left her dead to the silence of the desert. We went and looked at his grave. The fresh-turned sand was only a little darker than the rest, and, but for the trampled foot-marks round about, we should scarcely have been able to distinguish the new mound from the old ones. All were alike nameless. Some, more cared for than the rest, were bordered with large stones and filled with variegated pebbles. One or two were fenced about with a mud wall. All had a bowl of baked clay at the head. Wherever we saw a burial-ground in Nubia we saw these bowls upon the graves. The mourners, they told us, mourn here for forty days; during which time they come every Friday with fresh water, that the birds may drink from it. The bowls on the other graves were dry and full of sand; but the new bowl was brimming full and the water in it was hot to the touch. We found L---- and the happy couple standing at bay with their backs against a big lebbich tree, surrounded by an immense crowd and far from comfortable. Bent on “bazaaring,” they had probably shown themselves too ready to buy; so bringing the whole population, with all the mats, baskets, nose-rings, finger-rings, necklaces and bracelets in the place about their ears. Seeing the straits they were in, we ran to the dahabeeyah and dispatched three or four sailors to the rescue, who brought them off in triumph. Even in Egypt it does not answer, as a rule, to go about on shore without an escort. The people are apt to be importunate and can with difficulty be kept at a pleasant distance. But in Nubia, where the traveler’s life was scarcely safe fifty years ago, unprotected Ingleezeh are pretty certain to be disagreeably mobbed. The natives, in truth, are still mere savages _au fond_--the old war-paint being but half-disguised under a thin veneer of Mohammedanism. Some of the women who followed our friends to the boat, though in complexion as black as the rest, had light-blue eyes and frizzy red hair, the effect of which was indescribably frightful. Both here and at Ibrim there are many of these “fair” families, who claim to be descended from Bosnian fathers stationed in Nubia at the time of the conquest of Sultan Selim in A.D. 1517. They are immensely proud of their alien blood and think themselves quite beautiful.