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

BANDOUR. 237
ing such neat, clean little cuts upon them, that
at last I became convinced they were inflicted
purposely, and merely for the pleasure of wear-
ing a patch of sticking-plaister.
Amongst the beggars at Girsch6 Housseyn was
an old woman a hundred years of age, and the
first very old person I have seen in this country.
She was perfectly hideous; black and dried as a
mummy, and with a grey beard that would have
enabled her admirably to personify one of Mac-
beth's witches. There is no possibility of judging
of a Nubian woman's age from her appearance
the precocious developement of the human race
is such in this country, that men are married
at seventeen years of age, and women at thirteen
or fourteen ; at five and twenty they are past
their prime, and I have frequently been startled,
upon asking the age of some native, to hear that
it was thirty, when I expected that it must be
fifty at least.
The whole of the 16th and 17th we remained
at anchor opposite to Dandour, where we had
stopped to visit a small temple, very little worth
the time it cost us to see it, for even to my
unscientific eye it is quite a modern affkir,
and has, moreover, never been finished. But
amongst the sculptures I discovered a figure
;