As evening drew on, our head-wind became a hurricane; and that hurricane lasted day and night for thirty-six hours. All this time the Nile was driving up against the current in great rollers, like rollers on the Cornish coast when tide and wind set together from the west. To hear them roaring past in the darkness of the night--to feel the Philæ rocking, shivering, straining at her mooring-ropes and bumping perpetually against the bank, was far from pleasant. By day the scene was extraordinary. There were no clouds, but the air was thick with sand, through which the sun glimmered feebly. Some palms, looking gray and ghostlike on the bank above, bent as if they must break before the blast. The Nile was yeasty and flecked with brown foam, large lumps of which came swirling every now and then against our cabin windows. The opposite bank was simply nowhere. Judging only by what was visible from the deck one would have vowed that the dahabeeyah was moored against an open coast with an angry sea coming in. The wind fell about five A.M. the second day; when the men at once took to their oars and by breakfast-time brought us to Edfu. Nothing now could be more delicious than the weather. It was a cool, silvery, misty morning--such a morning as one never knows in Nubia, where the sun is no sooner up than one is plunged at once into the full blaze and stress of day. There were donkeys waiting for us on the bank and our way lay for about a mile through barley flats and cotton plantations. The country looked rich; the people smiling and well conditioned. We met a troop of them going down to the dahabeeyah with sheep, pigeons, poultry and a young ox for sale. Crossing a back-water, bridged by a few rickety palm-trunks, we now approached the village, which is perched, as usual, on the mounds of the ancient city. Meanwhile the great pylons--seeming to grow larger every moment--rose, creamy in light, against a soft-blue sky. Riding through lanes of huts we came presently to an open space and a long flight of roughly built steps in front of the temple. At the top of these steps we were standing on the level of the modern village. At the bottom we saw the massive pavement that marked the level of the ancient city. From that level rose the pylons which even from afar off had looked so large. We now found that those stupendous towers not only soared to a height of about seventy-five feet above our heads, but plunged down to a depth of at least forty more beneath our feet.