mournful, weary, incessant creak of the water-wheel (with its blindfold cow or camel plodding round and round and round, apparently for ever), which in this region almost entirely supersedes the hand-worked bucket. The contrast is very curious. I have just returned the governor's visit. I found him sitting on a sofa in the piazza opposite the Government House, with half-a-dozen hand lanterns brought by the guests in front of him, and on each side a long row of benches (forming an avenue up to his seat) on which squatted and smoked numbers of picturesque folk, who looked to great advantage by the flickering glimmer of the lamps and under the soft warm light of an African moon. I sat in the place of honour, smoked my conventional _tchibouque_, drank my inevitable cup of coffee, conveyed through my dragoman the usual traveller's remarks and questions (cardboard questions, so to speak, of which I knew the answers) to my host, who, like all the Turkish officials that I have seen, has the manners of a perfect gentleman and much natural dignity. _Sunday, 25th._--Started for Phylæ at half-past seven; arrived there at nine o'clock. The road leads through a broad tract of yellow sand (where, I believe, an arm of the Nile is supposed to have flowed in remote antiquity) along which on either side crop up, in wild, irregular fashion, bumps and hillocks and hills of dark red granite, covered over with innumerable fragments of the same stone, scattered in the most incredible confusion, and having rather a ludicrous appearance of having been _left about_ and forgotten. You could get an excellent notion of the thing in miniature, by hastily spilling a coal-scuttle on a gravel walk and running away. Above Assouan we are fairly in Nubia, and of course none but the darkest complexions are to be seen; but so large a number of negroes make their way here from the Soudan (the Nubians are not _black_, but of a beautiful dark cairngorm brown), that the whole place has an air of negro-land which is disagreeable to me. The young men, indeed, both black and brown, are sometimes extremely fine fellows (bar the legs, which are never good), but the girls, as far as one can see them, are tolerably ill-favoured, and the old women, of an ugliness which passes all belief. They are _far_ worse than apes. The ladies in this part of the country gladden the hearts of their admirers by anointing their bodies with castor oil, so that the atmosphere of their villages, however full of sweet suggestion to a native, is much the reverse to a traveller with a nose not attuned to these perfumes; the smell that greets you through an open door is a mixture of the bouquet just named, and a penetrating flavour of accumulated stuffed beasts, and naturally interferes much with my enjoyment.