Lastly, there are the minor inconveniences of sun, sand, wind, and flies. The whole place radiates heat, and seems almost to radiate light. The glare from above and the glare from below are alike intolerable. Dazzled, blinded, unable to even look at his subject without the aid of smoke-colored glasses, the sketcher whose tent is pitched upon the sandslope over against the great temple enjoys a foretaste of cremation. When the wind blows from the north (which at this time of the year is almost always) the heat is perhaps less distressing, but the sand is maddening. It fills your hair, your eyes, your water-bottles; silts up your color-box; dries into your skies; and reduces your Chinese white to a gritty paste the color of salad-dressing. As for the flies, they have a morbid appetite for water-colors. They follow your wet brush along the paper, leave their legs in the yellow ocher, and plunge with avidity into every little pool of cobalt as it is mixed ready for use. Nothing disagrees with them; nothing poisons them--not even olive-green. It was a delightful time, however--delightful alike for those who worked and those who rested--and these small troubles counted for nothing in the scale. Yet it was pleasant, all the same, to break away for a day or two, and be off to Wady Halfeh. CHAPTER XVII. THE SECOND CATARACT. A fresh breeze, a full sail, and the consciousness of a holiday well earned, carried us gayly along from Abou Simbel to Wady Halfeh. We started late in the afternoon of the first day, made about twelve miles before the wind dropped, and achieved the remaining twenty-eight miles before noon the next day. It was our last trip on the Nile under canvas. At Wady Halfeh the Philæ was doomed to be dismantled. The big sail that had so long been our pride and delight would there be taken down, and our good boat, her grace and swiftness gone at one fell swoop, would become a mere lumbering barge, more suggestive of civic outings on the Thames than of Cleopatra’s galley.