THEBES, _February_ 10 [1850].... The Valley of the Kings seems, though within a mile of Thebes, as if one had arrived at the mountains of Kaf, beyond which are only "creatures unknown to any but God,"--so deep are the ravines, so high and blue the sky, so absolutely solitary and unearthly, so utterly uninhabitable the place. One look at that valley would give you more idea of the supernatural, the gate of Hades, than all the descriptions, sacred or profane. What a moment it is, the entering that valley, where in those rocky caverns, the vastness and the gloomy darkness of which are equally awful, the kings of the earth lie, each in his huge sarcophagus, with the bodies of his chiefs, each in their chamber, about him; and where, about this time, they are to return, to find their bodies and resume their abode on earth,--if purified by their three thousand years of probation, in a higher and better state; if degraded, in a lower. I thought I met them at every turn in those long subterraneous galleries,--saw their shades rising from their shattered sarcophagi, and advancing once more towards the light of day, which shone like a star, so distant and so faint, at the end of that opening; the dead were stirred up, the chief ones of the earth.... Well, these Pharaohs are perhaps now here, again in the body, their three thousand years having just elapsed to some of them,--that is, if they have philosophized sincerely, or, together with philosophy, have "loved beautiful forms." ... And if I were a Pharaoh now, I would choose the Arab form, and come back to help these poor people; and I am going to-morrow to a tomb of Rameses, B.C. 1150, to meet him and tell him so....
It was no wonder that Miss Nightingale pitied the poor people; for the Egypt in which she travelled was as Mehemet Ali, the Lion of the Levant, had left it. She saw girls sold in the open slave market "at from £2 to £9 a head." She heard how justice was sold to the highest bidder; and "everybody," she noted, "seems to bastinado everybody else." "Every man," she noted further, "is a conscript for the army, and mothers put out their children's right eye to save them from conscription, till Mehemet Ali, who was too clever for them, had a one-eyed regiment, who carried the musket on the left shoulder." Miss Nightingale was fond of escaping from the dahabiah in order to wander about the desert, "poking my own nose," as she wrote home, "into all the villages," and seeing for herself how "these poor people" lived. "They call me 'the wild ass of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,' because I am so fond of getting away." Egyptian impressions stayed long in her memory, and they recurred to her thirty years later in connection with her Indian studies.[45] As on her earlier visit to Rome, so now in Egypt she utilized all such opportunities as came in her way for studying the work of religious Sisterhoods. At Alexandria she passed her days, she wrote, "much to my satisfaction, as I had travelled with two Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul from Paris to Auxerre, who gave me an introduction to the Sisters here; and I have spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and _Miséricorde_. There are only 19 of them, but they seem to do the work of 90."