The next night they reached Luxor, and caught the first glimpse of those interesting ruins by moonlight. There, silent and stately, arose the great Colonnade. There, quietly recalling the ancients, stood the twin Obelisk to the one at which Mr. Taylor had often looked in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, when as a boy he dreamed of distant Egypt. For seven miles around the Temple of Luxor are the ruins of ancient Thebes, within which were once the temples of Karnak, Luxor, Goorneh, Memnonium, and hundreds more, which now cumber the otherwise fertile plains. Thebes, with its hundred gates, with its countless armies, with its wise men, its Colossus that sang in the morning sunlight, its avenues of sphinxes and gods in stone, lay broken, spurned, and dead before them. The same moon looked down on them that gazed on the priests of Isis and the palace of its Cæsars. No one can imagine anything so solemn and grand as to stand in the moonlight on the haunted plains of ancient Thebes! One may have thought the Coliseum at Rome impressive beyond description when seen in the favorable light of an autumn moon, but when compared with Thebes it is tame and insignificant. Ages and ages before the rape of the Sabines, these temples had been constructed. They saw the morning of civilization; but now they are ruined and useless, the night seems best fitted for an appreciative view of them. Among the mighty colonnades whose columns are broken and falling, and around gigantic remains of ancient statues carved from a mountain of stone, Mr. Taylor wandered for two whole days. He scrutinized closely the long rows of ancient tombs, and stood in the rocky grave of Rameses I. The pictures on the walls of the tombs, the kind of rock, the original shape of the temples, the employments of the ancient races, the blue sky overhead, the clear atmosphere around, together with sketches of history and poetical allusions, shared in the interesting letters which Mr. Taylor wrote from Thebes. Such scenes contain an inspiration and an education which make scholars and statesmen of such as love history and appreciate the lessons those ruins teach. To one of Mr. Taylor’s disposition, a visit to such a place was a privilege not to be lightly thrown away. He investigated everything, and in a manner bordering on recklessness he descended through small holes into dark subterranean tombs, and with equal hardihood walked the crumbling roofs and cornices of the lofty ruins. He looked with disgust on the evidences of spoliations which were to be seen in splintered columns and fragments of ancient frescoes, and which were the work of scientific explorers. He regarded with a jealous anxiety the evidences of vandalism and decay, and wished sincerely that time and man would allow those precious relics of the old régime to remain forever intact. He appears to have regarded those massive wrecks as half-human, and sympathized with their forsaken and friendless condition.