The darkening water was replete with suggestions of this kind as we swam through it towards the kiosk. If only we could find the right doorway amidst all these ruins below us; if only the ghostly shadows of the water-plants, the pale forms of submerged altars, should be lit for a moment by the passing of some luminous spirit, so that we might dive below and follow ...! But as the fancy thus drifted we had crossed the open space and had entered the shadow of the great kiosk, whose columns towered above our heads against the last-left light of the sky, and were reflected with the stars in the water beneath us. Seated here on a sunken wall, my companion asked me whether I had called to mind Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” as we swam from the temple; and therewith he repeated those haunting lines which tell of one who Saw in sleep old palaces and towers ... All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them. And as we swam back to the steamer at length, through the gate of Philadelphus and down the colonnade, I felt that the whole experience had given us a new point of view in regard to the reservoir. One did not look forward only to the six months of each year when the water sinks and Philæ is left once more high and dry: the portion of the year when it is inundated also makes it appeal. Philæ clean and bare, as it must have been in ancient days, was good to look upon; Philæ overgrown with trees and grasses, as it was before the dam was built, was picturesque; but Philæ floating in the water, as it now does for half the year, has that indefinable charm of unreality which is the very essence of beauty. CHAPTER XI A NUBIAN HIGHWAY