The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six
miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has
grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal
hotel, obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of
iron. Twice or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple,
its impudent facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such
thing, it will readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure
pitiably the whole of the surroundings. The old Arab town, with its
little white houses, its minarets and its palm-trees, might as well
not exist. The famous temple and the forest of heavy Osiridean columns
admire themselves in vain in the waters of the river. It is the end of
Luxor.
And what a crowd of people is here! While, on the contrary, the
opposite bank seems so absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of
golden sand and, on the horizon, its mountains of the colour of
glowing embers, which, as we know, are full of mummies.
Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of tourist boats, a sort of two
or three storeyed barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from Cairo
to the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the vibration of their dynamos
make an intolerable noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my
dahabiya, where the functionaries of Messrs. Cook will not come to
disturb me?
We can now see nothing of the palaces of Thebes, whither I am to
repair in the evening. We are farther from them than we were last
night. The apparition during our morning's journey had slowly receded
in the plains flooded by sunlight. And then the Winter Palace and the
new boats shut out the view.
But this modern quay of Luxor, where I disembark at ten o'clock in the
morning in clear and radiant sunshine, is not without its amusing
side.
In a line with the Winter Palace a number of stalls follow one
another. All those things with which our tourists are wont to array
themselves are on sale there: fans, fly flaps, helmets and blue
spectacles. And, in thousands, photographs of the ruins. And there too
are the toys, the souvenirs of the Soudan: old negro knives, panther-
skins and gazelle horns. Numbers of Indians even are come to this
improvised fair, bringing their stuffs from Rajputana and Cashmere.
And, above all, there are dealers in mummies, offering for sale
mysteriously shaped coffins, mummy-cloths, dead hands, gods, scarabaei
- and the thousand and one things that this old soil has yielded for
centuries like an inexhaustible mine.
Along the stalls, keeping in the shade of the houses and the scattered
palms, pass representatives of the plutocracy of the world.
