It was by comparing our watches with those of the travelers whom we met at Abou Simbel, that we now found out how hopelessly our timekeepers and theirs had gone astray. We had been altering ours continually ever since leaving Cairo; but the sun was as continually putting them wrong again, so that we had lost all count of the true time. The first words with which we now greeted a new-comer were: “Do you know what o’clock it is?” To which the stranger as invariably replied that it was the very question he was himself about to ask. The confusion became at last so great that, finding that we had about eleven hours of day to thirteen of night, we decided to establish an arbitrary canon; so we called it seven when the sun rose and six when it set, which answered every purpose. It was between two and four o’clock, according to this time of ours, that the southern cross was now visible every morning. It is undoubtedly best seen at Abou Simbel. The river is here very wide and just where the constellation rises there is an opening in the mountains on the eastern bank, so that these four fine stars, though still low in the heavens, are seen in a free space of sky. If they make, even so, a less magnificent appearance than one has been led to expect, it is probably because we see them from too low a point of view. To say that a constellation is foreshortened sounds absurd; yet that is just what is the matter with the Southern Cross at Abou Simbel. Viewed at an angle of about thirty degrees, it necessarily looks distort and dim. If seen burning in the zenith, it would no doubt come up to the level of its reputation. It was now the fifth day after our return from Wady Halfeh, when an event occurred that roused us to an unwonted pitch of excitement and kept us at high pressure throughout the rest of our time. The day was Sunday; the date February 16, 1874; the time, according to Philæ reckoning, about eleven A.M., when the painter, enjoying his seventh day’s holiday after his own fashion, went strolling about among the rocks. He happened to turn his steps southward and, passing the front of the great temple, climbed to the top of a little shapeless mound of fallen cliff and sand and crude-brick wall, just against the corner where the mountain slopes down to the river. Immediately round this corner, looking almost due south, and approachable only by a narrow ledge of rock, are two votive tablets, sculptured and painted, both of the thirty-eighth year of Rameses II. We had seen these from the river as we came back from Wady Halfeh, and had remarked how fine the view must be from that point. Beyond the fact that they are colored and that the color upon them is still bright, there is nothing remarkable about these inscriptions. There are many such at Abou Simbel. Our painter did not, therefore, come here to examine the tablets; he was attracted solely by the view.