The sunset, as we went back across the plain, was gorgeous in vermilion, crimson, and yellow. The Colossi dominated the great expanse, and loomed up in the fading light like shapes out of the mysterious past.
Our dahabeëh had crept up to the east side of the island, and could only be reached by passing through sand and water. A deep though not wide channel of the Nile ran between us and the island. We were taken over this in a deep tub of a ferryboat. Laboriously wading through the sand and plowed fields of the island, we found our boat anchored in the stream, and the shore so shallow that even the sandal could not land. The sailors took us off to the row-boat on their backs.
In the evening the dahabeëh is worked across and secured to the crumbling bank of the Luxor. And the accomplishment of a voyage of four hundred and fifty miles in sixteen days is, of course, announced by rockets.
IT NEVER rains at Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is anxious to have it rain, so that he can say, “It rained when I was at Thebes, for the first time in four thousand years.”
It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this is that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found thus represented has had no existence.
To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side to the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its depths being full of all uncleanliness and smell—donkeys, peasants, and camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such a deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring of beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome, laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and sang “Hà! Yâlesah,” and “Yah! Mohammed” as they stood and pulled the unwieldy oars.
We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the stern, when my comrade said, “It rains, I think I felt a drop on my hand.”
“It can't be,” I said, “it has not rained here in four thousand years;” and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a drop or two did not fall into the river.
