Explore "The Glory of the Pharaohs" by Arthur Weigall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Opposite the town of Aswân, a short distance below the First Cataract of the Nile, there rises an island known to travellers by its Greek name of Elephantine. The river sweeps down from the cataract to east and west; southwards one may watch it flowing around a dozen dark clumps of granite rocks, which thrust themselves as it were breathless above the water; and northwards almost without hindrance it passes between the hills and palm-trees of the mainland. Nowadays should one stand upon the mounds which mark the site of the ancient city of Elephantine, and look east and north, one would feel that modern civilisation had hidden for ever the scenes of the past, and had prevented the imagination from re-picturing the place as it was in the older days. The huge Cataract Hotel overshadows the ruined city, and stares down from its pinnacle of granite on to the tumbled stones of ancient temples. On the island itself, opposite this hotel, the elaborate and ultra-modern rest-house of the Ministry of Public Works rises amidst its terraced gardens; and farther to the north stands the imposing Savoy Hotel, surrounded by luxuriant trees and flowers unknown to the ancient Egyptians. Eastwards the long, neat promenade of Aswân edges the river, backed by the Grand Hotel, the Government offices, and other large buildings; and at one end the noisy railway station tells the insistent tale of the Present.
During the winter one may watch the busy launches and small craft plying to and fro, and may see the quality and fashion of Europe amusing itself at either end of the passage; while at night the brilliant lights blaze into the waters of the Nile from a thousand electric lamps, and the sounds of the latest tune drift out through open windows. The place is modern: one sips one's whisky-and-soda above the crushed-down remains of Pharaonic splendours, plays tennis in a garden laid out above the libraries of the Ptolemies, and reads the _Daily Mail_ where, maybe, melancholy Juvenal wrote his Fifteenth Satire.