[Illustration: Camel-back.] the water shooting by us on a log, screaming to attract our attention, and then back again to us, with their teeth chattering for bakshish. But after that it was very different. The man at the tiller half stood up, and I could see, by the little patches of sand on his forehead that the wrinkles there had formed in two parallel lines, that he had been praying while we had been watching the boys swim, and by the same sign I could see that most of the crew had been doing the same thing; and Mohammed must have been with us, for fifty times within half that number of minutes we needed help. With the little man in the stern continually wetting his lips and jamming the tiller from side to side, apparently steering in just the wrong place, and always proving that he was right, we “shot” over the uneven surface of the river, dodging half-buried rocks, first near one bank and then the other, until we reached the natural bed of the [Illustration: The Sheik of the Pyramids.] river. Here the crew began their battle with the wind, and by evening, after much chanting and hard rowing on their part, we reached the _Nitocris_, feeling very much as if our faces had been sandpapered. During our stay at Elephantine we made friends with four little Bisharin girls. They were graceful and pretty, and had the power to make the most dismal tomb cheerful. They followed us to the quarries back of Assuan, and turned the top of the half-finished obelisk into a stage and danced in the sunlight, while the blackest man in Africa played an instrument of his own invention. And the last I remember of Assuan is their [Illustration: On Grenfell Hill. The Keeper of the Tomb, Assuan, December 29, 1897.] four little figures wrapped in the brightest-colored shawls that could be bought in Lower Egypt, and they waving their hands until a bend in the river hid them. It was a novelty to find ourselves going with the current, which had been until now against us, and we could count on much bigger runs; but there was double the danger of running on a sand-bar, and from that time on there was always a man with a pole in the bow. On the 30th we stopped beneath our old friend Komombos, and visited Edfu the next day; and from the top of its pylons we looked into the mud-walled yards of the town, where little fly-covered children stopped playing with goats and called to us, even at that height, for bakshish. On the 31st we were once more in Luxor, where the donkey-boys and beggars gave us a hearty welcome. Again we visited Thebes, and were followed from tomb to tomb by the usual venders of imitation antiques and shriveled mummy-hands. Our trips back from Thebes were always enlivened by donkey-races across the great fields of young wheat, in the middle of which the great Memnons sit. Those races generally proved that “Columbus” was a faster donkey than “New York.”