There Are Some Fine Reliefs Scattered Through These Mighty Ruins,
Showing Sebek With The Head Of A Crocodile, Heru-Ur With The Head Of A
Hawk So Characteristic Of Horus, And One Strange Animal Which Has No
Fewer Than Four Heads, Apparently Meant For The Heads Of Lions.
One
relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity,
and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts a
number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus-flowers.
I
remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with
Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the
end of the great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan
desert stretch to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked
curiously desolate and even sinister under a low, grey sky. Beyond the
wiry tamarisk-bushes, which grow far out from the shore, thousands
upon thousands of wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could
see. We took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked
fishermen, and were rowed with big, broad-bladed oars out upon the
silent flood that the silent desert surrounded. But the duck were too
wary ever to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently near,
they rose in black throngs, and skimmed low into the distance of the
wintry landscape, trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on
the wall of Kom Ombos.
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