boats and barges, and masts are only erected for towing purposes.

It was on a warm lovely morning in February that we spread ourselves on the carpet at the stern of the boat, and, towed by two sturdy fellahin, made our way against the current at the rate of about three miles an hour. As there is no regular towing-path, our progress is constantly impeded by overhanging trees, by projecting sakkyas, by the walls of mud - villages, which occasionally rise straight out of the water; and our trackers are sometimes wading waist deep, sometimes running far into the bean - fields to turn the corners of creeks-sometimes one side becomes impossible, and we have to take them on board and transfer them to the opposite bank; but in spite of all this, they push along with so much energy that we pass rapidly one or two old barges laden to the water's edge with manure-dust, but which are an extremely picturesque feature in the landscape-though, in so far as age and shape are concerned, they might advantageously figure in a museum of Egyptian antiquities. The banks are just too high to prevent our seeing much of the country over them, but they furnish us with glimpses of peasant life as we glide past the little mudvillages on their margin, where the women are engaged in their perpetual occupation of washing and filling their water-jars, or, squatted opposite the dead wall of a house, are jerking to and fro a goat-skin bag containing milk, with a view in this primitive fashion of converting it into butter, and where half-naked men are standing in rows opposite each other as if they were going to dance Sir Roger de Coverley, when suddenly they fall to with ponderous flails, and thrash out the corn, accom

panying their blows with a measured and not unmusical chant.

scream

Buffaloes, blindfolded in order that they may be spared a consciousness of the monotonous nature of their occupation, as they tramp slowly round in a circle, are grinding it, after it has been thrashed, in creaking mills, above which flocks of pigeons flutter round their quaint conical towers. Water is being dipped out of the canal by men in pairs working the doublelever shadoofs, who laboriously swing up and down the long bars weighted with mud at one end and with a basket - work bucket at the other. Naked children of the tenderest years are paddling in the mud, or ing with a virulence and pertinacity peculiar to the Arab infant. Amid these sights and sounds we glide gently through the rich country; and when we land, it is to look over an interminable expanse of wheat, beans, lentils, and clover, with here and there dark groves of date-trees clustered round villages on distant mounds. whole country is lulled into a luxury of repose, which the lowing of cattle, the wail of the waterwheels, and the hum of distant voices seem rather to enhance than to disturb; and our noiseless mode of travel is in keeping with the universal calm. In fact there is a sort of Sunday feeling in the very air of Egypt, which the sleepy agricultural operations of the peasantry are too placid to destroy. After we had proceeded thus for about an hour and a half, we landed to inspect a massive embankment which had been erected by the ancients, but had been renewed in more modern times to prevent the Bahr Youssef in seasons of inundation from bursting into the broad ravine of the Bahr - bela - ma, or "river without water"-most ap

The

propriately so called, for it was a wide dry wady about a hundred yards across, with precipitous banks thirty feet high - which cuts through the whole length of the Fayoum, winding away by the ragged bed the floods have cut for it in the course of the overflows of ages to the north-west, till it reaches the village of Tamiyeh, where it is dammed up into a small lake or reservoir, which discharges its superfluous waters into the Birket el Kurûn. In ancient times it is probable that this ravine, as well as another as gigantic, the Bahr Nazlet, which runs to the southwest, was used to carry off the waters of Lake Moris. These two wadies, with villages perched on the cliffs which form their banks, form a striking feature in the scenery of the Fayoum.

So long as the Bahr Youssef remains in the valley of the Nile, skirting the base of the Libyan hills, it inundates the country like its parent stream; but when it has passed the sluices of Illahoon and entered the Fayoum, it is brought under control, and only allowed to flow into the numerous wadies which are dry at other seasons. Sometimes, however, it bursts its restraining banks, and rushes into a new channel, scooping out the mud and forming the bed of a broad river. This had been the case with the Bahr-bela-ma, though at what date the embankment had been last renewed the boatmen were unable to tell me. At all events, its invasion upon that occasion involved a dike of great length and solidity, and must have been a work of great expense.

Soon after this the current became swifter, and the dolce far niente we had enjoyed to such perfection was rudely interrupted; a sakkya projecting into the river where it was unusually narrow,

forced it into quite a little rapid, the tow-rope got entangled with the water-wheel, and the mast gave way and came down with the run, breaking the rotten thwarts of the boat as she broached to the current, which swept us down sideways till we struck on a friendly bank. There was an immense amount of shouting and wading before we repaired damages and got under way again, but the Bahr Youssef had become a lively stream, and our progress was slow: we were, in fact, ascending to the level of the highest plateau of the Fayoum, and before long we came to a worse rapid than the last, where our men, unwarned by the previous disaster, allowed the same thing to happen to us. Fortunately we were not far from the village of Howara, the sheikh of which had been notified of our arrival the day before; and he appeared just at this juncture, accompanied by a large proportion of the male population of the village, and the donkeys upon which we were to ride to the Pyramid. We therefore determined to leave the boat to find its way up the next rapid without us, till it reached the spot nearest the Pyramid, where we intended to reembark, while we started off along the banks on donkey-back. We now soon began to observe evidences of antiquity; and these were of especial interest when we reached the ten-arched bridge of Kanatir el Agami. This spans a dry cultivated wady, in which is a grove of date-trees; but in ancient times it was the main channel by which the waters of the Bahr Youssef were conducted into Lake Moris. The ancient buttresses of the bridge rest on foundations of massive stone; and the embankment which now prevents the river from flowing into its old channel is very solid, and bears the marks of ex

treme age. We rode along it until we reached the Katasanta structure, which consists of a terrace of six carefully-jointed steps of large and well-hewn blocks, but bears no inscription whatever it no doubt formed part of the artificial limits of Lake Moris. Then we crossed the Bahr Wardani, a deep stream flowing out of the Bahr Youssef, also an ancient channel of the river, into the lake, and called by the Arabs the Bahr es Sherki, or "River of the East." We turned sharply after crossing it, and followed its left bank; then traversing a hot little bit of desert, we reached our destination, after a journey of three hours and a half from Medinet. The first view of the Labyrinth was eminently disappointing, and consisted of nothing but mounds of ruins. How ever, in the midst of these we came upon the traces of what probably was once a temple of some magnificence, though all that now remains of it are some large blocks of granite and limestone, and the shaft and capital of a papyrus column with traces of sculpture. Some blocks

here have been disinterred, which are now covered with sand, bearing the name of Amenemhat III. Traversing this waste of ruin, we reached the base of the Pyramid of Howara, and found a cool spot in its shade in which to lunch, prior to a more minute examination of the rounding objects. We began already to feel, however, that our imaginations had been unduly excited by the descriptions of the writers of antiquity by whom they had been visited.

sur

which we were investigating conceal substantial remains, yet to be discovered, of one of the most marvellous monuments of ancient grandeur and ingenuity of which we have any record. Herodotus writes:

"I have seen this monument; and I believe that if one were to unite all the buildings and all the works of the Greeks, they would yet be inferior to this edifice, both in labour and Ephesus and Samos are justly celeexpense, although the Temples of brated. Even the Pyramids are certainly monuments which surpass their expectation, and each one of them may be compared with the greatest productions of the Greeks. Nevertheless, the Labyrinth is greater still. We find in its interior twelve roofed aula, the doors of which are alternately opposite each other. Six of these aula face to the north, and six to the south: they are contiguous to one another, and encircled by an enceinte, formed by an exterior wall. The chambers that the buildings of the Labyrinth contain are all double, above it. They number 3000, 1500 one underground and the other built in each level. We traversed those that are above ground, and we speak of what we have seen; but for those which are below, we can only say what we were told, for on no account whatever would the guardians consent to show them to us. say that they contain the tombs of the kings who in ancient times built the Labyrinth, and those of the sacred crocodiles, so that we can only report on these chambers what we have heard. As to those of the upper storey, we have seen nothing greater among the works of man. The infinite variety of the corridors and the galleries which communicate with one another, and which one traverses before arriving at the aule, overwhelm with surprise those who visit these places, and who pass now from one of the aula into the chambers which surround it, now from one of these from the porticoes into the other aula. chambers into the porticoes, or again The ceilings are everywhere of stone, like the walls, and these walls are covered with numberless figures en

They

graved in the stone. Each one of these aula is ornamented with a peristyle executed in white stone, perfectly fitted. At the angle where the Labyrinth terminates there is a pyramid 240 feet in height, decorated with large figures sculptured in relief. There is an underground passage of communication with this pyramid."

Strabo, who visited the Labyrinth hundreds of years later, was no less struck with the magnificence and design of this wonderful

structure.

"There is also," he says, "the Labyrinth here, a work as important as the Pyramids,adjoining which is the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth. After advancing about thirty or forty stadia beyond the first entrance of the canal, there is a table-shaped surface on which rise a small tower and a vast palace, consisting of as many royal dwellings as there were formerly nomes. There is also an equal number of halls bordered with columns and adjoining each other, all being in the same row and forming one building, like a long wall having the halls in front of it. The entrances to the halls are opposite the wall. In front of the entrances are long and numerous passages, which have winding paths running through them, so that the ingress and egress to each hall is not practicable to a stranger without a guide. It is a marvellous fact that each of the ceilings of the chambers consists of a single stone, and also that the passages are covered in the same way with single slabs of extraordinary size, neither wood nor other building material having been employed. On ascending the roof, the height of which is inconsiderable, as there is only one storey, we observe a vast plain of stone slabs. Descending again, and looking into the halls, we may observe the whole series borne by twenty-seven monolithic columns: the walls also are constructed of stone of similar size. At the end of this structure, which is more than a stadium in length, is the tomb, consisting of a square pyramid, each side of which is four plethra [400 feet] in length, and of equal height. The deceased who is buried here is called Ismandes. It is also asserted

that so many palaces were built because it was the custom for all the nomes, represented by their magnates, with their priests and victims, to assemble here to offer sacrifices and gifts to the gods, and to deliberate on the most important concerns."

This is what we learn from ancient sources of the Labyrinth. It will now be interesting to turn to the only serious attempt which has been made in later years to explore its mysteries. This was undertaken by the Prussian expedition under Lepsius, about forty years ago,

when the identification of its site had first been made by Linant Bey. They had a hundred men at work for nearly a month, and this was the result:

"Where the French expedition had vainly sought for chambers, we literally at once found hundreds of them, both next to and above one another, small, often diminutive ones, besides greater ones, and large ones supported by small columns, with thresholds, and niches in the walls, with remains of columns and single casing stones, connected by corridors, so that the descriptions of Herodotus and Strabo in this respect are fully justified. The whole is so arranged that three immense masses of buildings 300 feet broad enclose a square place which is 600 feet long and 500 feet wide. The fourth side, one of the narrow ones, is bounded by the Pyramid which lies behind it

it is 300 feet square, and therefore does not quite reach the side wings of the above-mentioned masses of buildings. We found no inscriptions in the ruins of the great masses of chambers which surround the central space. It may easily be proved by future excavations that this whole building, and probably also the disposition of the twelve courts, belong only, in fact, to the twenty-sixth dynasty of Manetho, so that the original temple of Amenemhat formed merely part of this gigantic architectural enclosure."

It is most earnestly to be hoped that these excavations anticipated

by Lepsius will some day be made, as, when we compare his account with those of Herodotus and Strabo, it falls far short of what we should have been led to expect; and there can be little doubt that these mounds of sand, which cover the surface of a far greater area than he dealt with, conceal treasure which would richly reward further examination. Unfortunately his excavations have since been buried by the sand.

Our first proceeding after luncheon was to scramble to the top of the Pyramid so as to get a bird'seye view of the ruins. Strabo apparently overestimated its dimensions. When perfect, the base was fifty feet less each way than he gives it; and Herodotus, who puts the height at 240 feet, was more nearly right than Strabo, who estimates it at 400. It is by no means an imposing structure, and is one of four built of crude brick mixed with straw, one being at Illahoon, and two at Sakkara. If it was built, as Strabo tells us, by Ismandes, who is identical with Semempses, the fifth king of the first dynasty, then it is the oldest pyramid existing in Egypt. It has been suggested that it was built by Asychis, the fourth king of the third dynasty; but even in that case it must rank immediately after Meichun and Dashour, which become the oldest. The ground for this hypothesis is, that Herodotus tells us that, according to the priests, a king named Asychis, desirous of eclipsing all his predecessors, left a pyramid of brick as a monument of his reign, with the following inscription engraved on the stone:

"Despise me not in comparison with the stone pyramids, for I surpass them all, as much as Zeus surpasses the other gods. A pole was plunged into the lake, and the mud which clave thereto was gathered, and bricks

were made of the mud, and so I was formed."

On

The proximity of the lake may account for this allusion, and it has been ascertained that the nucleus is a natural mass of rock, thirty-nine feet high, which may be "the stone" upon which the inscription was cut. Its present appearance would certainly disappoint the king's expectations, for the sides have crumbled so much away that I have since regretted that I did not achieve the proud distinction of riding on my donkey to the top of the oldest pyramid in the world. It appears originally to have been built in stages, and from its summit we could obtain an idea of the shape of the Labyrinth, which was of a horse-shoe form, and of the position and size of the Temple, the remains of which were mapped out at our feet. the opposite side of the Bahr es Sherki we overlooked a congeries of crude brick-built chambers, all roofless. To the north was a long line of small chambers, with the crumbling walls of others scattered here and there. The form of Lake Moris, on the margin of which this pyramid was built, might also be detected by the aid of a strong imagination; and, about eight miles off, the Pyramid of Illahoon stood out sharply against the distant line of the hills beyond the Nile. To the southward a long grove of datetrees marked the limit of the oasis; and to the westward the town of Medinet, surrounded by gardens and palm-trees, formed an attractive feature in the landscape. To the eastward, all was desert, bounded by sand-hills. A closer inspection of the ruins, after we had descended from the Pyramid, on the left bank of the Bahr es Sherki, disclosed little of interest beyond a curious sort of double underground passage, formed by flags of lime