A PHANTOM CITY. 163 creature, vexed at his momentary fear, would not condescend to ruffle himself further, and neither of us could fling high enough to reach him. Sulky and motionless as the painted gods on pillar and wall, he stood, fixed, as if he had been a statue, to that splendid pedestal. We hit upon a secret stairway crowded with sculptured forms, leading up through the thickness of a wall to a rather dangerous standpoint on some architraves binding the pillars of an inner sanctuary. From hence we gained a tolerably commanding view of the whole scene. The view was naturally limited by the light, and its effect by the same cause exaggerated. Space and distance are not to be grappled with under the gleam of a southern moon. To us it seemed as if a vast city lay before us, reposing in a breathless trance. We could picture to ourselves its streets, its squares, its palaces, its arcades, its domes-populous with a myriad shadowy beings, held for ever in stony silence. Massive patches of black shade scarred that broad expanse of temple, for the most part flooded in the moon's soft splendour. We could discern the radiating lines of more than one sphinx avenue in the distance, mapped out on the sand. Nearer, slanting rows of shadows marked the presence of some colonnade. A phalanx of Osiride pillars stood in high relief in the forefront of the sanctuary beneath us, each with its colossal human form appended, tipped with light-a shrouded figure, erect, serene, with arms folded over the breast, as in the hushed repose of death. But, indeed, all lesser incidents were lost in the overwhelming effect of the whole-an effect that it would be difficult to overstate. It would be difficult, also, to analyze the mingled feelings that moonlit scene called up in the mind. Together with the sentiments of awe and fear which it developed-so that a laugh would have been immediately resented, and you were led instinctively to converse in an undertone-another feeling was begot which tinctured everything with its own colouring. And from this came the true lesson to be learnt. It was, in fact, the lesson which all visible nature teaches, as intelligibly from the Alpine pinnacle that crumbles away crag by crag, and trickles in dustwreaths down to the plain, as from the scarlet poppy withering ere evening's fall under the reaper's sickle. "Passing away," saith the world-"passing away! If ever those words of Prospero were fitted to fall deep into the heart of a man, it would be there—in such a scene, at such an hour. We repeated them amid that chaos of fallen stone. "The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve." KARNAC BY MOONLIGHT. 165 We cast a lingering look beyond the river to the girdling mountains in the west,, and to the eastern plain which stretched calm before us like some boundless sea of sand, and then descended from our height. The shadows had lengthened sensibly, and the moon was dipping low into the river as we made our way homewards across the plain. N CHAPTER XVII. A DINNER WITH MUSTAPHA. "Persicos odi, puer, apparatus."-Horace. Ir had been our intention to linger at Thebes but one night; chance, however, once more delayed us. Before going on our moonlight expedition to Karnac, as recorded in the last chapter-indeed, immediately on arrival at Luxor-we paid a visit to Mustapha Aga, who holds a kind of British consulship at Thebes. Mustapha's house is not far from the river's bank. It is one of the best in Upper Egypt-which, indeed, is not saying much; but, such as it is, it is built in the courts of Amunoph's temple, and boasts of as fine a portico as the Parthenon. Mustapha, with an eye to the dignity of his post, has managed to introduce his porch between two pillars of the great colonnade leading to the adyta, to which his dwelling, a rough roomy structure, hangs as a pendant, the relative proportions of the two being about on a par with Falstaff's gallon of sack to his "ha'porth" of bread. THE CONSUL MUSTAPHA. 167 We walked up a flight of broad stairs, built with fragments of ruin, to the door, sat down, by request of the attendant slave, between two big lotus-capped columns sculptured from base to capital, and waited for Mustapha. High overhead, on a colossal architrave, the British flag was floating, and a kind of home feeling crept over us as we sat there beneath it, watching the crimson glory of the after-glow fade out of the western hills across the river, in the fabled regions of the blest. Mustapha Aga rejoices greatly under the shadow of this British flag. He can buy and sell and get gain, and the moneys that he can thus accumulate are safe; the like of which does not hold good with his unprotected brethren. The Pasha of Egypt has endless ways of exercising a paternal pressure on the incomes of his subjects, as well as infinite means of knowing what they possess. Moneys find their way to the Pasha as naturally as waters flow to the sea. Some people indeed hide their riches in wells, or under green trees, and submit to torture, and so escape. Mustapha is a useful man at Thebes-to English travellers, I mean. He is full of such information as they require; knows who is up the river, and the proximate intentions of such; keeps a registry of dates and names (very distinguished autographs are |