The drift rose to the lap of the northernmost colossus and half-way up the legs of the next when the Philæ lay at Abou Simbel. The doorway was clear, however, almost to the threshold, and the sand inside was not more than two feet deep in the first hall. The whole façade, we were told, had been laid bare, and the interior swept and garnished, when the Empress of the French, after opening the Suez Canal in 1869, went up the Nile as far as the second cataract. By this time, most likely, that yellow carpet lies thick and soft in every chamber, and is fast silting up the doorway again. How well I remember the restless excitement of our first day at Abou Simbel! While the morning was yet cool, the painter and writer wandered to and fro, comparing and selecting points of view and superintending the pitching of their tents. The painter planted his on the very brink of the bank, face to face with the colossi and the open doorway. The writer perched some forty feet higher on the pitch of the sandslope; so getting a side view of the façade and a peep of distance looking up the river. To fix the tent up there was no easy matter. It was only by sinking the tent-pole in a hole filled with stones that it could be trusted to stand against the steady push of the north wind, which at this season is almost always blowing. Meanwhile the travelers from the other dahabeeyahs were tramping backward and forward between the two temples; filling the air with laughter and waking strange echoes in the hollow mountains. As the day wore on, however, they returned to their boats, which one by one spread their sails and bore away for Wady Halfeh. When they were fairly gone and we had the marvelous place all to ourselves we went to see the temples. The smaller one, though it comes first in order of sailing, is generally seen last; and seen therefore to disadvantage. To eyes fresh from the “Abode of Ra,” the “Abode of Hathor” looks less than its actual size; which is, in fact, but little inferior to that of the temple at Derr. A first hall, measuring some forty feet in length by twenty-one in width, leads to a transverse corridor, two side-chambers, and a sanctuary seven feet square, at the upper end of which are the shattered remains of a cow-headed statue of Hathor. Six square pillars, as at Derr, support what, for want of a better word, one must call the ceiling of the hall; though the ceiling is, in truth, the superincumbent mountain.