ASWAN AND LUXOR

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 114, 16 May 1942, Page 5

ASWAN AND LUXOR

SOLDIERS' HOLIDAY

TRAVELLING IN EGYPT

An interesting account of a weekend trip which he made from Cairo to Aswan (or Assuan) and Luxor is given by Sapper lan Watt, of the Divisional Engineers Company, in a letter to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Watt, of Makarewa, Southland. Sapper Watt writes:—

"It was a great trip, and we covered 1200 miles by rail, plus a fair mileage by car and boat. On arriving at Aswan we went by car down to the Nile, where we embarked in sailing boats and crossed over to an island called Kitchener's Island. It seems that Kitchener made this place his headquarters while qarrying out the campaign which made him so famous. The island itself was a beautiful spot. Some of the flower pots were just a blaze of colour. We had lunch in the place, and what a treat it was to sit on green grass under the shade of huge trees.

On the island I met an interesting old fellow. I noticed him wearing a Cameron tartan scarf. He proudly told me he had served as a sort of personal servant and interpreter to Lord Kitchener, and the scarf was the same as a piece of tartan Sir Hector Macdonald had given him many years ago."

Sapper Watt adds that on another island they saw the ruins of a temple said to have been built by Alexander the Great, and also a stone wall built by the Romans for the purpose of measuring the rise of the Nile in flood times. In this way the Romans judged the value of the floods in irrigating Egypt, and this enabled them to fix the amount of land tax. In a quarry they saw "a half-finished obelisk of tremendous dimensions, but the old king had died before it was finished, and there it still remains to this day."

At Luxor they visited the ruins of a temple. "We all piled into gharries which were to convey us to this place," he says. "These the boys soon took charge of, and what should have been a long line of carriages sallying forth in dignity was soon turned into a ding-dong chariot race, which seemed to create quite a sensation among the natives. I was crowded out on one of the corners, and much to the disgust of the rest of our chaps we were forced to come in last."

After inspecting this temple and the famous temple of Luxor, the party went to the Valley of the Kings, where the ancient kings of Egypt were buried. The first tomb they saw was that of Tutankhamen.