Although I have not seen, to speak with her, the august lady who reigns over Egypt, I have been visited by her son, the lord Prince Remeses. I have already written of him. He is in his thirty-fourth year, and the noblest appearing man my eyes ever beheld. Upon his brow the gods have set the seal and impress of command. I will narrate the manner of our first intercourse.
I was standing by the window of the stately apartment, which overlooks one of the squares of the city, interested in watching the toils of several hundred men, coarsely attired in blue aprons or loin-cloths, and gray breeches reaching only to the knee, the upper part of their bodies being naked, who were at work constructing a wall which was to inclose a new lake before the temple of Apis, in the midst of the square; for On is a city of alternate lakes (all of great beauty and adorned with trees), temples, squares, and palaces, interspersed with dromos of sphinxes connecting court after court, through lofty pylones; while obelisks, statues, and fountains fill up the interspaces.
My window not only commanded a view of these laborers with their heavy burdens of bricks, borne on their shoulders to the top of the wall they were building, but also, beyond the wall and distant temples, a glimpse of the yellow expanse of the desert. How mighty, and grand, and solemn it looked in its loneliness and ocean-like vastness! A faint dark line that I at length perceived in motion, was, doubtless, a caravan coming from the haven of the Red Sea, where the galleys from Farther Ind land their precious freights of untold wealth. This caravan seeks the port of On, six miles below on the Nile, whence sail ships, laden with the treasures of the caravan, to all parts of the known earth. Sesostris, Thothmes, Menes, all planned a canal from the Nile to this sea; but the camels are the only ships, to this day, that cross this desert waste. Again my eyes rested upon the laborers, seeing that they were sorely pressed by cruel taskmasters, who, with long rods, urged them to their ceaseless toil. I perceived, then, that they were men with Syrian features, arched eagle noses, long black beards, and narrow but fine eyes, which seemed to have a strange expression of tears in them. There were among them noble and manly men, handsome youths, though pale with toil, and bent forms of aged men. I marvelled to see so fine a race thus in bondage, as slaves under taskmasters, for in the day of the Phœnician Pharaohs, there were no such bondmen in the land of Egypt. From their remarkable likeness to some natives of Mesopotamia I had seen in Tyre, I judged that they must be captives of that ancient Orient people, taken in the wars of Amunoph.