At Assouan the faithful subjects of the Khedive surpassed themselves. Sunny Assouan lends itself readily to a festal garb. Situated where the Nile broadens out after emerging from the rocky defile of the cataract, the town has a most picturesque aspect at all times; its embanked river-front makes it the neatest of all the cities of Upper Egypt. Elephantine and the Sirdar’s Island rise green and smiling out of the broad bosom of the river; the perpetual blue sky makes everything doubly attractive to the Northern visitor. Dressed for the festival, it was a charming scene. Triumphal arches of the sacred yellow and brown, gorgeous hangings and many-coloured festoons, bore testimony to the Oriental love of vivid hues; steamers and dahabiehs, moored in line along the shore as well as along Elephantine Island, vied with each other in their decorations, and numerous feluccas were plying to and fro, half hidden by their burdens of flags and palm-leaves. At night thousands of lamps decorated shore and river alike, and the whole scene resembled nothing so much as a Henley in Regatta Week, with its illuminations unrestrained by doubts of weather. To the ear, however, the voices of the night told a very different tale. The crooning song of the Nubian boatmen, ‘Great is the Prophet, praise be to him!’ accompanying the creaking of their clumsy oars with monotonous persistency, sounded weird and barbaric over the twinkling waters. The bustle in the town, too, was no mere ordinary festal murmur; for this was the month of Ramadan, and the feast of lamps meant a great deal to all faithful Moslems. All day long they have abstained from food or drink, and the going down of the sun is keenly welcomed as the end of one day more of fasting. The secret of the prosperity of Assouan lies in its granite. It is the granite bed of the river at this point that makes the Reservoir possible; here are the granite quarries from which the Dam was built, and from which every ruler of Egypt who wished to raise a monument for all time has drawn his supplies. Nothing that I have seen in this country brings the past so near as these quarries. Here lies a rough-hewn obelisk, just ready to be rolled away; here an enormous block of stone half hollowed into a bath for an Emperor, or a sarcophagus for an Apis bull, designed by some mighty ruler who ‘thought in continents,’ and recked little of the lives and labours of thousands provided he gratified his whim. But suddenly death or some other fate intervened, and a feebler or more merciful generation has never taken up the work. You may see the marks of the wedges on some great face of rock, as fresh as if it was only yesterday that Pharaoh’s workmen had driven them in and poured water on the wood till it swelled and burst the stone; down below is the fallen piece still waiting for the mason who never came back to it. Perhaps some of the very stones cut by Cheops or Rameses have been smoothed and planed and set in the Great Dam.