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Updated: May 14, 2025
You said to Lord Ernest Borrow in the Temple of Abu Simbel, that you could never be happy, until the Organization Richard O'Brien betrayed, "forgot and forgave his daughter and yourself." Through me, the Organisation now formally both forgets and forgives. Wishing you well in future, Yours truly,
Somehow I knew that things were bound to happen at Abu Simbel. I didn't know what they would be, but they hovered invisible at my berth-side in the night, and whispered to warn me that I might expect them. A few people rose stealthily before dawn to prepare for Abu Simbel, because it had been hammered into their intellects by me that this Rock-Temple was the Great Thing of the Upper Nile.
Men are very much alike all the world over! This great dagoba was put up by one of the Cingalese kings, Dutugemunu, to celebrate his great victory over the Tamils, just as Rameses II. put up the inimitable temple of Abu Simbel to celebrate his victory over the Syrians.
With pleasure would we have given immediate chase, had not the Enchantress been pledged to remain at Abu Simbel till afternoon. Even as it was, I expected to catch up with a boat so much smaller than our own; but Anthony damped my hopes, explaining the difficulties of navigation between Abu Simbel and Wady Haifa.
Rapidly we fly down-stream, past Abu Simbel, past the sweeps of deep rich yellow sand seen nowhere south of Assouan in such glorious colouring; sand that is swept smooth by the wind into great banks and drifts with sharp edges like snow-drifts; past masses of plum-coloured rock sticking up out of it; past defiles of stony mountains falling sheer to the water; hiding here and there in their folds tiny villages indistinguishable from the rocks without glasses.
At Abu Simbel Bedr had quarrelled with the gentlemen, because he began to suspect they meant harm to the ladies, or to one of them. He had been clever, and got on board the Enchantress as they told him to do. He had obtained writing-paper, and typed a copy of a letter. In America, he had learned to do typing.
The colossi of Abû Simbel, without being of quite such formidable proportions, face the river in imposing array. To say that the decline of Egyptian art began with Rameses II. is a commonplace of contemporary criticism; yet nothing is less true than an axiom of this kind.
For of course the men had remained at Abu Simbel, hiding till we should be out of the way, and sending their boat on to put us off the track. A Cook steamer and a Hamburgh-American boat were due to stop at the temple. We had passed both on the river. By this time the two men were doubtless on their way north, making for Cairo and safety.
At Abû Simbel, the two temples are excavated entirely in the cliff. These colossi are sixty-six feet high. The doorway passed, there comes a first hall measuring 130 feet in length by 60 feet in width, which corresponds to the usual peristyle. Eight Osiride statues backed by as many square pillars, seem to bear the mountain on their heads.
The long velvety tread of the camel, the song of the camel-driver, the monotonous chant of the river-man, with fingers mechanically falling on his little drum, the cry of the eagle of the Libyan Hills, the lap of the heavy waters of the Dead Sea down by Jericho, the battle-call of the Druses beyond Damascus, the lonely gigantic figures at the mouth of the temple of Abou Simbel, looking out with the eternal question to the unanswering desert, the delicate ruins of moonlit Baalbec, with the snow mountains hovering above, the green oases, and the deep wells where the caravans lay down in peace all these were pouring their influences on his mind in the little Quaker village of Hamley where life was so bare, so grave.
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