Having gratified his curiosity with a glance at these celebrated spots, Belzoni returned to Assouan, and from thence proceeded to Thebes, where he immediately put in train the measures necessary for conveying down the river the Memnon’s head, and various other antiquities. The obstacles which were thrown in his way by the obstinacy of the natives, and the intrigues of Drovetti, and other collectors of antiquities, were numerous, and highly disgraceful to their originators. Nevertheless, on the 17th of November, 1816, he succeeded in placing the head on board of a boat, in which he set sail on the 21st for Cairo, where he arrived on the 15th of December, after a voyage of twenty-four days. All professions reckon among their members many knaves and many fools; but the antiquarians with whom Belzoni came in contact deserved, in several instances, to be sent to the galleys. His labours were, as a matter of course, depreciated by several foreigners of this cast, who absurdly misrepresented his researches. In this number must be reckoned Count Forbin, who was frightened away from Thebes by beholding the apparition of an English waiting-maid in a blue pelisse among the ruins. This gentleman, in his absurd “Travels,” represents our traveller as having employed six months in placing the colossal bust on board the boat, although he knew, or should have known, that the operation did not occupy a sixth part of that time. The origin of this contemptible fiction was the jealousy which the idea of seeing this extraordinary piece of antiquity in the possession of the English inspired. An able writer in the Quarterly Review, after animadverting in a very spirited manner upon the meanness of these proceedings, observes, “But detraction, it would appear, is not all that Mr. Belzoni has had to sustain from this irrational jealousy. M. Drovetti, French consul, has, as Count Forbin observes, two agents at Thebes,--the one a Mameluke, named Yousuf, originally a drummer in the French army; the other a Marseillese renegade of the name of Riffo, ‘small in stature, bold, enterprising, and choleric; beating the Arabs because they had neither time nor taste to understand the Provençal language.’ These persons are more than suspected of being concerned in a plot against the life of Mr. Belzoni, who was recently fired at from behind a wall, while employed in his researches among the ruins of Carnac, where these two fellows were then known to be lurking. The affair has been brought before the Consular Court at Cairo; and we trust that M. Drovetti, for the sake of his own character and that of his country, will not interfere with the judicial proceedings, nor attempt to shelter his agents from the punishment which awaits them.”