At Mahatter we left our donkeys and took a boat to Phylæ, a quarter of a mile, which takes half an hour owing to the rapidity of the current just above the cataract. The scenery about Phylæ has been spoken of as Paradise; I never saw anything less like my notion of Paradise, and so far, therefore, I am disappointed. Original and strange it is, in a high degree. It is in fact exactly like the valley of which I spoke a little further back, only that the hills are four times as high, and water takes the place of the sand; the same breaking up of the rocks into a myriad of fragments, putting all grandeur and massiveness of form out of the question--and, with the exception of a few palm trees and a sycamore or two, the same barrenness. Looking up in the direction of Wâdy Halfâ, the mountains appear to grow finer in outline, and a tract of very yellow sand amongst their highest crests is striking and original--gold dust in a cup of lapis lazuli. With the island itself and its beautiful group of temples it is impossible not to be delighted. Nothing could be more fantastic or more stately than the manner in which it rises out of the bosom of the river like a vast ship, surrounded as it is on all sides by a high wall sheer from the water to the level on which the temples stand. One hall in the main temple, and one only, shows still a sufficient amount of colour to give a very good idea of what the effect must have been originally; the green and blue capitals must have been very lovely. It is needless to say that here, as elsewhere, travellers have left by hundreds lasting memorials of their brutality, in the shape of names and dates drawn, painted, scratched, and cut on every wall and column, so that the eye finds no rest from them. This strange and ineffably vulgar mania is as old as the world, and the tombs of the kings at Thebes are scrawled over with inscriptions left there by ancient Greek and Roman visitors. I shall return to Phylæ shortly to make a sketch or two--_Insha Allah._