Beyond the village I wandered into a delightful garden; a half cultivated wilderness of palm and gum trees in which one came on unexpected pergolas, and lovely garden trees all pouring out their most intoxicating scents under the fiercest sun I ever walked beneath. I saw oleanders, the flowers of which were as thick as roses and smelt like a quintessence of nectarines; there were also some beautiful olive trees with weeping branches--a thing I had never seen before--and with berries as large as plums. Overhead, amongst the yellow dates, sat doves the colour of pale violets. Syoot itself is beautifully situated amongst groves and gardens; except in that it is brown and not white, it reminded me much of an Algerine town; it is very unlike Cairo. The rock-cut tombs in the mountain above the town are so mutilated and disfigured that little can be made of them; but they have that stamp of vastness which is so characteristic of all the ancient monuments of this country. The view from the height is very fine. The river has barely begun to fall yet, so that everything is reflected in the great sheets of water that cover the land. At evening I saw the sunset through the tall palm trees, with the domes of Syoot dark against its flaming light. For a fine showy assertion that looks very original and striking, but is not calculated for pedantic verification, commend me to a Frenchman. The other day, at Boulay, Mariette Bey, the creator and the curator of the Museum of that ilk, and a man of high standing as an Egyptologist, told me that the Nile was turned into its actual course by a great chain of hills at Syoot which, serving as a rampart, alone prevented it from following its obvious tendency to flow into the Red Sea. "Il allait _évidemment_ se jeter dans la Mer Rouge;" in fact, but for this hill, there would have been no Lower Egypt, that country being literally the child of the Nile which alone prevents the sands of the central deserts from ruling over the whole breadth of the land. Here was a dramatic revelation of coincidences! Here was a startling suggestion of contingencies!