My Winter on the Nile Volume 1-2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 Excerpt: ...was inundated by the annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here into a lake, as Herodotus reports. We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of green and a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square mud-houses. At Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are some beautiful columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time. The wind is strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer we come to the tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that we get nothing but desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season: that is, it breeds at night cool air, although one does not complain of its frigidity who walks over it at midday. After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as wild and lovely as that at Phils. The river narrows, there are granite rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles in swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky islands--not without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series of rapids, not difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through savage nature and gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalabshe, where are remains of the largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee--'the house of the saint'--where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of the rock; past Gerf Hossayn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger temple out of the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures in which he appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a husbandman threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient stone wall in Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn't advertising himsel...