A pilgrimage to the temples and tombs of Egypt, Nubia, and ...

214 TEMPLES OF IBSAMBOUL.
spective—and glimpses of pictured walls, where
the attributes and feats of gods and heroes were
mingled together in glowing hues—and proces-
sions of priests and princes in their gorgeous
robes passing along them—and gigantic forms
looking down from their stony pedestals in awful
calm—and the Holy of Holies, the dark sanc-
tuary, with its sculptured gods, wrapped in
solemn gloom beyond, indistinct and fearful as
the mysterious rites enacted there, which filled
their votaries' breasts with trembling awe !
And
now wdiat has succeeded to all that pomp?
Where the deities were enshrined, the bat has
made its foul nest — and where the priests of
Ammon unrobed themselves, there the serpent
casts its skin !
Oh
vanity of vanities ! Could
the seer's prophetic eye have penetrated so far
into futurity as to behold the actual desolation of
Egypt's proud fanes, what a subject would they
have furnished for that saddening text of "the
preacher " all is vanity !
Derr, 13th Dec.
We found ourselves, on waking this morning,
at Derr the capital of Nubia—and such a capital !
1 should rather say such a capital joke to api)ly
the term to a collection of mud hovels ! It,
however, contains an excavated temple of sand-