We were wakened once or twice in the night by the sharp, stinging bites of sandflies--one of the plagues of Egypt; and the efforts of several bats to catch them within a few inches of one’s face were met, I fear, with hard words. However, the night soon passed, and with the first light we were up and doing. An exploration of the place revealed much that was of interest, and, indeed, added one very valuable item to our stock of material for ancient Egyptian history. Upon a face of cliff near the quarry I found a large inscription which showed that the alabaster had been worked in the reign of Queen Nefertari-Ahmosis, a name which means, by the way, “The Beautiful Companion of the Child of the Moon.” This queen was the wife of the Pharaoh Ahmosis I., who freed Egypt from the rule of the Hyksos in the sixteenth century B.C. Her monuments are not numerous, but it has been noticed that her name is given great prominence when it occurs beside that of her husband, although he was a popular hero. Here in this quarry no mention is made of the Pharaoh at all, and it would seem that the queen was paramount and that her name was sufficient upon public monuments. As soon as the Hyksos had been driven from the land the temples were rebuilt, and there must have been a considerable demand for alabaster with which to ornament them. Inscriptions of this period describe the magnificent alabaster shrines which were constructed, and there are very numerous smaller objects of this material still extant. Most of the stone was procured from the famous Hatnub quarries, a few miles north of Assiout; and it is an indication of the quantity required that this new quarry was opened. There appears to be no other ancient inscription in this valley; but there is abundant evidence that the stone was worked in modern times, perhaps in the days of Mohammed Ali or even later. The hill-side is covered with blocks of alabaster roughly hewn from the rock, and marked with numbers and short directions in Arabic writing. These magnificent white blocks, three or four feet square, abandoned here in the desert as though worthless, remind one very forcibly of the riches of this splendid country between the Nile and the Red Sea which has produced some of the finest ornamental stones ever used, some of the best gold of ancient times, and now is yielding a quantity of petroleum. In like manner one sees Imperial Porphyry lying abandoned at the quarries of Gebel Dukhân and Granito del Foro at those of Um Etgal, as though these materials were of no particular value. The Nile valley is rich enough, but the desert is prodigal.