The course of the Nile through the territory of Nubia presents. considerable modifications in the scenery. For the most part the river is shut in by hills of granite and sandstone. The valley between these is arid, barren, sun-baked. It has the dull, leaden aspect of a desert. A few stunted palms are the only traces of vegetation that the eye can discover. Cultivation is nearly impossible, except here and there within a narrow strip of land on either side of the river. In some parts it is painfully carried on by means of irrigation-the water- wheels being worked by oxen, on whose labours those of the husbandman depend for success.
The traveller now finds himself beyond the domain of history; and though he constantly passes both town and temple in never-ending series, he knows of no interest connected with them apart from that which usually attaches to the ruins of the past. He feels now that the Nile itself is the greatest marvel of his journey; which, although rolling along at the distance of eight hundred miles from the sea, has lost nothing of its volume or its majesty.
At this long distance from the coast of the Mediterranean he arrives at Ipsambul, or Abou-Simbel. Here, on the confines of the pathless and unpeopled desert, stands one of Egypt"s most striking mar vels-the Temple of the Sun, built by Rameses, whose gigantic statue sits there in the solitude, still unbroken, and revealed from head to foot. This statue is repeated four times: two are buried in the sand, and the third is overthrown and in fragments; but from the fourth stilllooks down the face of the greatest man of the old world, who flourished long before the rise of Greece and Rome-the first conqueror recorded in history-the glory of Egypt, the terror of Asia-the second founder of Thebes, which must have been to the world then what Rome was in the days of her empire.
"The chief thought," says Dean Stanley, "that strikes one at Ipsambul, and elsewhere, is the rapidity of transition in Egyptian worship from the sublime to the ridiculous. The gods alternate between the majesty of antediluvian angels and the grotesqueness of pre-Adamite monsters. By what strange contradiction could the same sculptors and worshippers have conceived the grave and awful forms of Ammon and Osiris, and the ludicrous images of gods in all shapes "in the heavens and in the earth, and in the waters under the earth," with heads of hawk, and crocodile, and jackal, and ape? What must have been the mind and muscle of a nation who could worship, as at Thebes, in the assemblage of hundreds of colossal Pashts-the sacred cats?
