It took them three afternoons to complete the job; and we were all sorry when it came to an end. To see Reïs Hassan artistically touching up a gigantic nose almost as long as himself; Riskalli and the cook-boy staggering to and fro with relays of coffee, brewed “thick and slab” for the purpose; Salame perched cross-legged, like some complacent imp, on the towering rim of the great pschent overhead; the rest chattering and skipping about the scaffolding like monkeys, was, I will venture to say, a sight more comic than has ever been seen at Abou Simbel before or since. Rameses’ appetite for coffee was prodigious. He consumed I know not how many gallons a day. Our cook stood aghast at the demand made upon his stores. Never before had he been called upon to provide for a guest whose mouth measured three feet and a half in width. Still, the result justified the expenditure. The coffee proved a capital match for the sandstone; and though it was not possible wholly to restore the uniformity of the original surface, we at least succeeded in obliterating those ghastly splotches, which for so many years have marred this beautiful face as with the unsightliness of leprosy. What with boating, fishing, lying in wait for crocodiles, cleaning the colossus, and filling reams of thin letter paper to friends at home, we got through the first week quickly enough--the painter and the writer working hard, meanwhile, in their respective ways; the painter on his big canvas in front of the temple; the writer shifting her little tent as she listed. Now, although the most delightful occupation in life is undoubtedly sketching, it must be admitted that the sketcher at Abou Simbel works under difficulties. Foremost among these comes the difficulty of position. The great temple stands within about twenty-five yards of the brink of the bank, and the lesser temple within as many feet; so that to get far enough from one’s subject is simply impossible. The present writer sketched the small temple from the deck of the dahabeeyah; there being no point of view obtainable on shore. Next comes the difficulty of color. Everything, except the sky and the river, is yellow--yellow, that is to say, “with a difference”; yellow ranging through every gradation of orange, maize, apricot, gold and buff. The mountains are sandstone; the temples are sandstone; the sandslope is powdered sandstone from the sandstone desert. In all these objects, the scale of color is necessarily the same. Even the shadows, glowing with reflected light, give back tempered repetitions of the dominant hue. Hence it follows that he who strives, however humbly, to reproduce the facts of the scene before him, is compelled, _bon gré, mal gré_, to execute what some of our young painters would nowadays call a symphony in yellow.