. William H. Seward's travels around the world. inct and dreamy pictures, like those in mountain agates. Forty rods from the river-bank, on a terrace of sand, whichseems to be a lower ridge of the dome, there rise before us two rowsof majestic columns, roofless, but held together by architraves notless massive. Familiar all our lives with pictorial representations,we recognize the ruined Temple of Luxor. Beyond that ruin, withthe exception of here and there a mud-hut, is only the naked desert;at the left of the colonnade, heaps of debris, half buried in the the midst of these masses, t
. William H. Seward's travels around the world. inct and dreamy pictures, like those in mountain agates. Forty rods from the river-bank, on a terrace of sand, whichseems to be a lower ridge of the dome, there rise before us two rowsof majestic columns, roofless, but held together by architraves notless massive. Familiar all our lives with pictorial representations,we recognize the ruined Temple of Luxor. Beyond that ruin, withthe exception of here and there a mud-hut, is only the naked desert;at the left of the colonnade, heaps of debris, half buried in the the midst of these masses, towers up a red granite obelisk, high-er and newer than the honey-combed one which marks the site of 536 EGYPT AND PALESTINE. the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis. Beyond these debris, lookingthrough the vista formed by the colonnade and obelisk, are seen thedwarfish minarets of a shabby Arab mosque, rising out of a groupor cluster of adobe huts, an Arab village, which may contain fifteenhundred people. Three tall, modem houses loom up above the. OBELISK8 AT KARNAK. roofless dwellings of the wretched town. These houses are built onthe wall of the dilapidated temple, and of materials taken from it,and are the residences of the governor, the British consul, and theUnited States vice-consul, who also flourishes under an exequatur ORIGIN OF LUXOR. 537 as consul of Brazil. We ascended the terrace and stood on thepavement beneath the double colonnade. At a distance of twomiles northward, among fields which, though now dry and dusty,still wear the aspect of careful cultivation, we see the stupendousgate-ways, columns, and obelisks of Karnak. An Arab hamlet nes-tles at the base of these ruins, as at Luxor. Beyond Karnak we seeonly the winding river and the converging Libyan and Arabian Des-erts. Turning our back upon the morning sun, we see, across theriver, a plain, stretching along the opposite bank for five miles, andthree miles in width, cultivated though uninhabited, subject tc in-u
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