The side-chambers at Gerf Hossayn are infested with bats. These bats are the great sight of the place and have their appointed showman. We find him waiting for us with an end of tarred rope, which he flings, blazing, into the pitch-dark doorway. For a moment we see the whole ceiling hung, as it were, with a close fringe of white, filmy-looking pendants. But it is only for a moment. The next instant the creatures are all in motion, dashing out madly in our faces like driven snowflakes. We picked up a dead one afterward, when the rush was over, and examined it by the outer daylight--a lovely little creature, white and downy, with fine transparent wings and little pink feet and the prettiest mousey mouth imaginable. Bordered with dwarf palms, acacias and henna-bushes, the cliffs between Gerf Hossayn and Dendoor stand out in detached masses so like ruins that sometimes we can hardly believe they are rocks. At Dendoor, when the sun is setting and a delicious gloom is stealing up the valley, we visit a tiny temple on the western bank. It stands out above the river surrounded by a wall of inclosure and consists of a single pylon, a portico, two little chambers and a sanctuary. The whole thing is like an exquisite toy, so covered with sculptures, so smooth, so new-looking, so admirably built. Seeing them half by sunset, half by dusk, it matters not that these delicately wrought bas-reliefs are of the decadence school.[164] The rosy half-light of an Egyptian after-glow covers a multitude of sins, and steeps the whole in an atmosphere of romance. Wondering what has happened to the climate, we wake shivering next morning an hour or so before break of day, and, for the first time in several weeks, taste the old, early chill upon the air. When the sun rises, we find ourselves at Kalabsheh, having passed the limit of the tropic during the night. Henceforth, no matter how great the heat may be by day, this chill invariably comes with the dark hour before dawn. The usual yelling crowd, with the usual beads, baskets, eggs, and pigeons, for sale, greets us on the shore at Kalabsheh. One of the men has a fine old two-handed sword in a shabby blue velvet sheath, for which he asks five napoleons. It looks as if it might have belonged to a crusader. Some of the women bring buffalo-cream in filthy-looking black skins slung round their waists like girdles. The cream is excellent; but the skins temper one’s enjoyment of the unaccustomed dainty.