and teeth (a thick row of little bristle-like teeth). They are fat and shiny and most insipid eating. _Wednesday, 4th._--Started at six down stream; my face is turned towards bonny old England again, and I feel as if I had wings. At Kom Ombo (the first halt to-day) there are some ruins on a rock which crops up abruptly by the riverside in the midst of a flat country. The morning was divine, and the view from the temple, looking north, surpassingly lovely in colour. The form was nothing much; a vast sandy plain (tigered here and there with stripes of green), and in the distance a long low nest of mountain peaks; but the colour!--the gradation from the fawn-coloured glimmering sands in the foreground to the faint horizon with its hem of amethyst and sapphire was as enchanting a thing, in the sweet morning light, as I have ever seen. The temple is fine though heavy, and less delicate in detail than Phylæ. On the under surface of the architrave, between the columns, are some most curious and interesting unfinished decorations, on squares marked out in red, and showing (slight sketch) such as for instance a figure tried two ways on the same spot. The outlines are drawn out, in red also, with extraordinary firmness and freedom. Speaking of the squares, Gardiner Wilkinson--in his, I am told, most erudite, and, I am certain, most dry and heavy, guide-book--says that they were used (in the manner in which "squaring off" is practised in the present day) for the purpose of transferring a design. In this, however, he is obviously mistaken, because the squares are adapted not to the pictures but to the space to be decorated; the hieroglyphs and the figures being adapted to the squares, not the squares to them: that these squares, once made the _basis_ of the decoration and fixing its proportions and distribution, may then have been used also for enlarging a small design, or even, instead of tracing, for transferring one of the same size, is probable enough; but that was not their original function. In corroboration of this view, compare the frets and ornaments painted on the _back_ of the architrave of the Parthenon, which I have examined closely; they are painted in squares marked out with a sharp instrument, and determining the space to be decorated exactly as at Kom Ombo. The case is so entirely parallel as to suggest the idea that the Greeks learnt the practice in Egypt. The great temple of Edfou, where we stopped next, far surpasses anything I have yet seen in Egypt; not so much, perhaps, for any especial beauty of detail--although the sculptures are extremely fine--as for its general aspect, which is superb, and its wonderful state of preservation; many parts of it look as if they had been finished yesterday. The gigantic Propylæa, and the no less gigantic wall