THE PASSING OF PHILAE Leaving Assouan--as soon as we have passed the last house--we come at once upon the desert.

And now the night is falling, a cold February night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky.
Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos of granite and sand, its warm tones and reddish colour.

But there are telegraph poles and the lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear in the empty horizon.

And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The most commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on the quay of Assouan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its aspects of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use of the tourists and the ladies.
First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand at the beginning of these quasi-solitudes.

Such old cemeteries of every epoch of history.