DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.4393#0342
324 A THOUSAND MILES UP T11E NILE.
CHAPTER XIX.
BACK THROUGH NUBIA.
There are fourteen temples between Abou Simbel and
Philae; to say nothing of grottoes, tombs and other ruins.
As a rule, people begin to get tired of temples about this
time and vote them too plentiful. Meek travelers go
through them as a duty; but the greater number rebel.
Our happy couple, I grieve to say, went over to the major-
ity. Dead to shame, they openly proclaimed themselves
bored. They even skipped several temples.
For myself, I was never bored by them. Though they
had been twice as many, I should not have wished them
fewer. Miss Martineau tells how, in this part of the
river, she was scarcely satisfied to sit down to breakfast
without having first explored a temple; but I could have
breakfasted, dined, supped on temples. My appetite for
them was insatiable and grew with what it fed upon. I
went over them all. I took notes of them all. I sketched
them every one.
I may as well say at once that I shall reproduce but few
of those notes and only some of those sketches in the
present volume. If, surrounded by their local associations,
these ruins fail to interest many who travel far to see them,
it is not to be supposed that they would interest readers at
home. Hero and there, perhaps, might be one who would
care to pore with me over every broken sculpture; to spell
out every half-legible cartouche; to trace through Greek
and Roman influences (which are nowhere more conspicuous
than in these Nubian buildings) the slow deterioration of the
Egyptian style. But the world for the most part reserves
itself, and rightly, for the great epochs and the great names
of the past; and because it has not yet had too much of
Karnak, of Abou Simbel, of the pyramids, it sets slight
store by those minor monuments which record the periods
of foreign rule and the decline of nati-ve art. For these
CHAPTER XIX.
BACK THROUGH NUBIA.
There are fourteen temples between Abou Simbel and
Philae; to say nothing of grottoes, tombs and other ruins.
As a rule, people begin to get tired of temples about this
time and vote them too plentiful. Meek travelers go
through them as a duty; but the greater number rebel.
Our happy couple, I grieve to say, went over to the major-
ity. Dead to shame, they openly proclaimed themselves
bored. They even skipped several temples.
For myself, I was never bored by them. Though they
had been twice as many, I should not have wished them
fewer. Miss Martineau tells how, in this part of the
river, she was scarcely satisfied to sit down to breakfast
without having first explored a temple; but I could have
breakfasted, dined, supped on temples. My appetite for
them was insatiable and grew with what it fed upon. I
went over them all. I took notes of them all. I sketched
them every one.
I may as well say at once that I shall reproduce but few
of those notes and only some of those sketches in the
present volume. If, surrounded by their local associations,
these ruins fail to interest many who travel far to see them,
it is not to be supposed that they would interest readers at
home. Hero and there, perhaps, might be one who would
care to pore with me over every broken sculpture; to spell
out every half-legible cartouche; to trace through Greek
and Roman influences (which are nowhere more conspicuous
than in these Nubian buildings) the slow deterioration of the
Egyptian style. But the world for the most part reserves
itself, and rightly, for the great epochs and the great names
of the past; and because it has not yet had too much of
Karnak, of Abou Simbel, of the pyramids, it sets slight
store by those minor monuments which record the periods
of foreign rule and the decline of nati-ve art. For these