In the desert between Assouan and Philae.details

A new picture now opens before our eyes: the desert lies all round us, broken only by bare granite rocks and tombs, on which the sand lies like a yellow shroud. The thousands who sleep here are not ancient Egyptians, but Moslems, many of whom lived within the first centuries of the spread of Islam in Egypt, and whose survivors decorated their graves with tombstones which perpetuate their names to later generations.

The oldest of these tablets bear inscriptions in a venerable Kufic character, and date from the ninth and tenth centuries of our era. Texts from the Koran may be read on many of them, which is a singular circumstance, for the prophet desired that such texts should not be inscribed on tombs. Parallel to this vast burial-place, along the

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