Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/108

90 native, who slides down the statue, leaving it none the worse for his having mounted it, than the terrible foreigner, armed with jackknife and chisel, bent on immortalising his name by inscribing it side by side with the cartouche of a Pharaoh.

There is, or was, an American—his identity the relator of his exploits mercifully conceals—who went the round of the Egyptian temples with a pot of tar in one hand and a brush in the other, and daubed his idiotic signature on the walls of each. The motive which prompts these outrages defies psychological analysis. One can only tentatively conjecture that men like the Yankee with the tar brush hope that we, who disgustedly read their names, will "wonder who and what they are." Whereas we do not wonder, we know. We could name and classify them as easily as we can the animals they probably rode; and our only wonder is what particular circle of the Inferno is reserved for their final abode. Happily there are none