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Hence, the tourist to the Nile valley, when viewing, near the base of old Cheops, the great Egyptian pyramid, a colossal head and bust of a woman, carved in stone, and learns that it is attached to a body, in the form of a lion in a crouching attitude 146 feet long, hidden beneath the shifting sands of the Libyan desert; if possessed of the knowledge of the precession of the Equinoxes, he will be enabled to solve the riddle of the Sphinx by recognizing in that grotesque monument the mid-summer symbol of solar worship, when the Summer Solstice was between the signs of Leo and Virgo.

When the first men and women were created, forces were set in action which have resulted in this Me that to-day thinks and wills and loves. Heredity includes savagery and culture, health and disease, empire and serfdom, hope and despair. Each man can say: "In me rise impulses that ran riot in the veins of Anak, that belonged to Libyan slaves and to the Ptolemaic line.

The cause unknown; yet his presaging mind The fate of Dido from the fire divined. Dire auguries from hence the Trojans draw; Till neither fires nor shining shores they saw. The fleet was no sooner out of sight of the Libyan coast than the pilot Palinurus observed signs of a storm. He proposed, therefore, that they should make for the Sicilian shore, which was not far distant.

Along a sort of belt walk which ran entirely around the enclosure dôm palms alternated with sycamores, squares of ground were planted with fig, peach, almond, olive, pomegranate and other fruit trees; others, again, were planted with ornamental trees only: the tamarisk, the cassia, the acacia, the myrtle, the mimosa, and some still rarer gum-trees found beyond the cataracts of the Nile, under the Tropic of Cancer, in the oases of the Libyan Desert, and upon the shores of the Erythrean Gulf; for the Egyptians are very fond of cultivating shrubs and flowers, and they exact new species as a tribute from the peoples they have conquered.

The people of Tigennis have a mythus, that, on the death of Antæus his wife Tinge cohabited with Hercules, that Sophax was the issue of their connexion, and became king of the country, and named a city after his mother; they further say that Sophax had a son, Diodorus, whom many of the Libyan nations submitted to, as he had a Greek army of Olbiani and Mycenæi, who were settled in those parts by Hercules.

There they lay in the quiet night, these mighty pyramids, shone on by the bright stars, guarded by the watchman of the desert the gigantic sphinx, and overlooking the barren rocks of the Libyan stony mountains.

The scene represented a background of desert mountains, and on the stage itself, before a group of temporary huts, stood huddling together the black Libyan prisoners, some fifty men, women, and children, bedizened with gaudy feathers and girdles of tasselled leather, brandishing their spears and targets, and glaring out with white eyes on the strange scene before them, in childish awe and wonder.

The following allusion to Perseus is from Milman's "Samor": "As'mid the fabled Libyan bridal stood Perseus in stern tranquillity of wrath, Half stood, half floated on his ankle-plumes Out-swelling, while the bright face on his shield Looked into stone the raging fray; so rose, But with no magic arms, wearing alone Th' appalling and control of his firm look, The Briton Samor; at his rising awe Went abroad, and the riotous hall was mute."

"An' what fer do ye need food before y'r execution?" he added, with a twist of his mouth. "Before execution, ye turkey-cock before execution is the time to eat and drink. How shall the bloomin' carnage gore the Libyan sands, if there ain't no refreshment for the vitals and the diagrams?"

Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.