Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/341

Rh whereas, before British occupation, a conscript was regarded as a doomed man, seldom heard of again by his kith and kin. The abolition, also, of the forced unpaid labour of the Corvée, annually impressed for canal and other work, has worked wonders. It was said that the fellaheen would never work, for wages, without the lash. They do so willingly. The country is being regenerated by a mere handful of British officers and civilians. Tact, courage, justice, unselfish care for the best interests of the people, is doing far more than the millions of British capital spent in material advancement of the land. Of the latter we saw a great instance, in the great Dam at Assouan, above the First Cataract. It was in its first stage; it will increase by irrigation the area of available land to a great extent.

The temples and monuments, tombs of the kings, and their palaces are too big a topic for a letter like this, but I must add a word or two about the temples of Philæ, a few miles above the first cataract, where Egypt proper ends. Leaving our boat at Assouan, we had a little experience of a desert journey, yellow hard sand underfoot, not a sign of vegetation, silence, solitude, and sunshine; here and there an outcrop of granite rock, rounded and weathered with the sandstorms of centuries, purplish in colour, and occasionally inscribed with hieroglyphics. These rocks give the only chance of shade in a "weary land" of uninterrupted sunshine. Turning the corner of one of them, there was the Nile in view, and rising out of it an island, sixty feet above the water, its steep sides clothed with vegetation, and above, the outline of pillared temples. They are not ancient, as antiquity goes in Egypt, being only of the Ptolemaic age, 300 B.C. Philæ was