In a corner an electrical workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black smoke, and all about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making a great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content, are a number of Cook's tourists of both sexes, and some even who verily seem to have no sex at all.

They are come for the royal audience; some on asses, some in jaunting cars, and some, the stout ladies who are grown short of wind, in chairs carried by the Bedouins.

From the four points of Europe they have assembled in this desert ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at the bottom of a hole.
Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates the name of a kingly mummy--Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX., etc.

Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have recently been removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not ceased to attract crowds.

From each underground habitation are emerging now a number of perspiring Cooks and Cookesses.