Here they were, these male and female octogenarians, not propped up in arm chairs dividing the family silverware and arranging bequests to hospitals and libraries, but out on the blinding desert, thousands of miles from home, falling off donkeys, climbing up on camels, devouring guide books, rummaging around for time tables, kicking on the charges, and leading on the whole a life of purple strenuosity. We heard of two English women, sisters, both over seventy, who had just returned from Khartoum, from which point they had gone on a hunting expedition still further into the interior. They had to wear mosquito bags and semi-male attire, and were out in the wild country for days at a time, chasing gazelles, hyenas, and other indigenous fauna. Just as I am about to conclude this treatise it occurs to me that, although I have given a wealth of useful information regarding the Pyramids, I have rather overlooked our old friend the Sphinx. I can only say in passing that it looks exactly like the printed advertisements. There is no deception about it. It is in a bad state of repair, but this is not surprising when we consider its age. Herodotus does not mention the Sphinx. It was right there at the time. In fact, it had been there fourteen hundred years when he first arrived. It seems strange that an observing traveller should have overlooked a monument sixty-six feet high, with a face nearly fourteen feet wide, a nose five feet and seven inches long, and wearing a smile that measures over seven feet! Herodotus either walked by without seeing it or else he did not think it worthy of mention. The only plausible explanation is that he was too busy figuring up the garlic statistics. ON THE NILE CHAPTER XIV DASHING UP THE NILE IN COMPANY WITH MR. PEASLEY AND OTHERS The dream of many years has come true. We are moving (southward) up the Nile. Like busy sand flies we are flitting, almost daily, across white patches of desert to burrow into second-hand tombs and crick our necks looking up at mutilated temples. Ten years ago not one of us had ever heard of Koti or Khnemhotep. Now we refer to them in the most casual way, as if we had roomed with them for a while. It is certainly a gay life we are leading over the cemetery circuit. Just think what rollicking fun it must be to revel day after day in sarcophagi and sepulchres, stumbling through subterranean passages and kicking up the dust of departed kings, peering down into mummy pits, also trying to stretch the imagination like a rubber band so that we may get the full significance of what is meant by 1500 B.C. People come to Egypt to cure nervous depression and then spend nine-tenths of their time hanging around tombs. Why come all the way to Egypt? Why not go out to Woodlawn and run foot races from one family vault to another? [Illustration: _It is certainly a gay life_]