There was a red glow in the sky when our train slipped out of the Cairo station toward Luxor. The Nile was red, too, and against this tide of evening were those curious sail-boats of Egypt that are like great pointed-winged butterflies, and the tall palms of the farther shore. By-and-by we began to run through mud villages that rose from the river among the palms, wonderfully picturesque in the gathering dusk. This was the Egypt of the pictures, the Egypt we have always known. No need to strain one's imagination to accept this reality. You are possessed, enveloped by it, and I cannot think that I enjoyed it any the less from seeing it through the window of a comfortable diner, with the knowledge that an equally comfortable, even if tiny, state-room was reserved in the car ahead. The back of a camel or deck of a dahabiyah would be more picturesque, certainly--more poetic--but those things require time, and there are drawbacks, too. Railway travel in Egypt is both swift and satisfactory. The accommodations differ somewhat from those of America, but not unpleasantly. We were a small party now. There were fewer than twenty of us--all English-speaking, except a young man who shared my apartment and was polite enough to pretend to understand my German. It was a little after 5 A.M. when I heard him getting up. I inquired if there was "_Etwas los?_" which is the ship idiom for asking if anything had gone wrong. He said no, but that the sun would be upstanding directly, which brought me into similar action. One does not miss sunrises on the Nile, if one cares for sunrises anywhere. We hurried through our dressing and were out on the platform when the train drew up for water at Nag Hamadeh--a station like many others, surrounded by the green luxury of the Nile's fertile strip, with yellow desert and mountains pressing close on either hand. It was just before sunrise. The eastward sky was all resonant with ruddy tones--a stately overture of its coming. Uplifting palms, moveless in the morning air, broke the horizon line, while nearer lay the low village--compact and flat of roof--a vast, irregular hive built of that old material of Egypt, bricks without straw. Below it the Nile repeated the palms, the village, the swelling symphony of dawn. Only here and there was any sign of life. An Arab woman with a water-jar drowsed toward the river-bank; a camp of Bedouins with their camels and their tents were beginning to stir and kindle their morning fires. The railroad crosses the river here, and just as we were creeping out over the slow-moving flood the sun rose, and the orchestra of the sky broke into a majestic crescendo, as rare and radiant and splendid as it was when Memnon answered to its waking thrill and sang welcome to the day.