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At Karnak, they are not carried lower than from 7 to 10 feet; at Luxor, on the side anciently washed by the river, three courses of masonry, each measuring about 2-1/2 feet in depth, form a great platform on which the walls rest; while at the Ramesseum, the brickwork bed on which the colonnade stands does not seem to be more than 10 feet deep.
The process is neither so long nor so difficult as might be supposed. In the Gizeh Museum is a life-size head, produced from a block of black and red granite in less than a fortnight by one of the best forgers in Luxor. I have no doubt that the ancient Egyptians worked in precisely the same way, and mastered the hardest stones by the use of iron.
"Hamza is he your servant?" she asked, with an apparent irrelevance, that was not really irrelevance. "He is a donkey-boy at Luxor." "Yes. He used not to be my donkey-boy. He has only been my donkey-boy since since my husband has gone. They say in Luxor he is really a dervish." "They say many things in Luxor." "They call him the praying donkey-boy. Has he too been to Mecca?"
We did this for five years in succession, living in a bungalow which we built at a place in the desert, not far from the banks of the Nile, about half way between Luxor which was the ancient Thebes, and Assouan.
For he has paid nothing for that immense power which results from the union and harmony of laborers, and the convergence and simultaneousness of their efforts. Two hundred grenadiers stood the obelisk of Luxor upon its base in a few hours; do you suppose that one man could have accomplished the same task in two hundred days?
Yet sometimes it was difficult to bear the almost stony reserve which took the colour out of his life in the Villa Androud. It would have been more difficult still if he too, like Bella Donna, had not had his work to do in the dark. Since they had arrived in Luxor he had been seeking for a motive. The moment came when at last he found it.
We ate our dinner that evening and breakfast the following morning in a modern dining car attached to the train. At nine o'clock on Saturday morning the train arrived at our destination, the town of Luxor, about four hundred miles south of Cairo.
Virtue may be its own reward, but it makes you very lonely! I hadn't another easy moment for dreaming the Nile-dream. And we all woke out of it when, with the pink dawn of a certain morning, we saw a vast temple, repeated column for column, in the clear river, as in a mirror of glass. We were at Luxor; and somewhere not far off, Mabella Hanem was praying for release.
Come to prayer!" The sun began to sink. "Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me." The voice of the muezzin died away. There was a silence; and then, as if in answer to the cry from the minaret, I heard the chime of the angelus bell from the Catholic church of Luxor. "Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark." I sat very still.
Behold me then, for some two or three hours, alone among the temples of the Pharaohs. The tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at this moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return till very late, when the full moon will have risen and be shedding its clear light upon the ruins.
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