Pressing amongst them impudent young Bedouins pester the fair travellers to mount their saddled donkeys.

And as if they were charged to add to this babel a note of beauty, the battalions of Mr.Cook, of both sexes, and always in a hurry, pass by with long strides.
Beyond the shops, following the line of the quay, there are other hotels.

Less aggressive, all of them, than the Winter Palace, they have had the discretion not to raise themselves too high, and to cover their fronts with white chalk in the Arab fashion, even to conceal themselves in clusters of palm-trees.
And finally there is the colossal temple of Luxor, looking as out of place now as the poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, and which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde.
Bordering the Nile, it is a colossal grove of stone, about three hundred yards in length.

In epochs of a magnificence that is now scarcely conceivable this forest of columns grew high and thick, rising impetuously at the bidding of Amenophis and the great Ramses.

And how beautiful it must have been even yesterday, dominating in its superb disarray this surrounding country, vowed for centuries to neglect and silence! But to-day, with all these things that men have built around it, you might say that it no longer exists.
We reach an iron-barred gate and, to enter, have to show our permit to the guards.