Subsequently the sun of Egypt has lavished on the whole its ardent reddish patines.

And now the mountains imitate in places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine, and elsewhere huge bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.
Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, the summits, illumined to the point of dazzling, rise up in the light--like red cinders of a glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that turns almost to darkness.

We seem to be walking in some valley of the Apocalypse with flaming walls.

Silence and death, beneath a transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis--it was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their necropoles.
The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and at the end of this "Valley of the Kings," under the sun now nearly meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we expected to come upon a dread silence.

But what is this?
At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking recess, what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean?
Is it a meeting, a fair?
Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand some fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion.