Fra Giovanni was a Franciscan. His face was one
that you loved to look at. A calm and beautiful face.
Sometimes, when the long black lashes fell over his cheek
and his mind went wandering over the hills about San
Germano in the fair land of Italy, I used to think I
was looking at the face of him of Patmos, the beloved
disciple, who, much as he loved the ascended Christ, yet
remained longest of all the twelve away from him; and
when my friend prayed, as I have seen him pray, with
tears, and yet very bright hope, in his eyes, I used to remember
the same John, and think I could see his eyes,
when he uttered the last fervent prayer that his Lord
would come quickly, from whom he had been so long
separated.

We met in the theatre at Arles, that old town of the
south of France which boasts a rival to the Roman Coliseum.
I was sitting in the twilight, with no one but

Miriam and the guardian near me, and I was dreaming,
as I suppose any enthusiastic American may be permitted
to dream the first time he finds his feet on the boards—on
the rocks, I should say—of an ancient theatre. The fading
light was not unfavorable to such an occupation. Ghosts
came at my call and filled the otherwise vacant seats.

I saw fair women, brave men, magistrates, soldiers, senators,
and an emperor, yea verily, an emperor, in the seat
between the marble columns. There were wrestlers, just
come from the games near by in the amphitheatre, standing
by the stage, and dancers, and jesters, and masked
figures flitting to and fro. All was silent. But the
silence grew intolerable, and at length I interrupted it
myself.

You need not laugh at me for talking Greek. Those
Roman ghosts could understand Greek as well as English,
or, for that matter, as well as Latin, and if they knew any
thing they should have known Æschylus. So I acted
prompter and gave them
whereupon the ghosts vanished. In a flash, in the twinkling
of a star, the scene was one of cold bare rocks in the
gray twilight, a ruined hall, fallen columns over which
countless snails were crawling, and Kaiser and actor were
dust of a verity under my feet.

But a voice answered my voice. For in a nook among
the confused stones near the stage had been sitting, all
this time, a person that I had not seen, whose clear soft
voice came pleasantly to me as he hailed congenial company
in this place of ruins.

“Who is there, that would renew old and familiar
echoes in these walls?”

“Why? Do you think they ever heard that before?”

“The Prometheus? Yes—why not? There were
scholarly days when the fashionable Romans delighted in
Greek plays.”

We walked out, all together, and down to the miserable
forum and the hotel, where, in the evening, over a bottle
of St. Peray that I had brought from Valence with my
own baggage, we talked down the hours. Thus I became
acquainted with Fra Giovanni—and our acquaintance fast
ripened. He was an Italian, young, wealthy, of good family,
and a priest. He had not been long an ecclesiastic.
There were moments when the former life flashed out
through the fine eyes under his cowl. The memory of
other times alternately lit and darkened his face. There
was some deep grief there of which he never told me, and
which I never sought to know. He was a good, gentle,
faithful friend. That was enough.

Some time after that, we were standing in the crypt of
the cathedral of St John's at Malta. That day we were
to separate. I to go eastward, and he to travel he scarcely
knew whither, on the work of his sacred calling. Before
us, in marble silence, lay the stout Villiers de l'Isle
Adam, and a little way off the brave Valetta, sleeping
after his last great battle with the Turks, who surrounded
this, his rocky fortress.

He who goes to the East should always go by way of
Malta. It is a proper stepping-stone between Europe and
the Orient, where the last wave of the crusades rolled
back from the walls of Jerusalem, and sank in foam.

“You. will find yourself always looking back to this
little crypt in the middle of the sea, wherever your footsteps
turn,” said Fra Giovanni. “No place in the
Mediterranean is so intimately connected with the history
of the East as this island of Malta, and there is
scarcely any part of the Orient in which you will not be
reminded of it. This fact alone, that it is the place of

the death and burial of that mighty order who for so
great a period swayed the sceptre of power in Europe, is
enough to connect it with Egypt and Holy Land, indeed
with all the possessions of the Turks. Here, when Valetta
was Grand Master, the arms of the Moslem had
their first great check, and the followers of the false
prophet learned that their boasted invincibility was a
fable. Here, too, but yesterday, when the great leader
of the French had garrisoned the island, your stout cousins
of England, who followed his swift feet as the hounds
follow after the deer, drove out his soldiery. You will
think of that when you see the boastful inscription of
Desaix at the cataract of the Nile. There have been
valiant deeds done on this rock. If the sea could have
a voice, it would tell of men of might, and deeds of might
done here, that are themes for bards who love to celebrate
the great acts of men. But the sea is the only
living thing that knows them. For there are no trees,
nor ancient vines, nor any thing here but the great rock,
and the living, moving, throbbing sea around it.”

I don't know but my friend would have talked on all
day, had not a gun from the harbor announced that the
steamer was heaving up her anchor.

We left the crypt and walked over the splendid floor
of the cathedral, which is inlaid with a thousand tombstones
of knights of the Cross. I glanced once more at
the picture of the Beheading of John, which Caravaggio
painted that he might be admitted to the order, and
painted in fading colors (water some say) that the evidence
of his debasement of the art, and their debasement
of the order, might disappear; and then, rushing out into
the Strada Reale, and plunging down the steep narrow
streets to the landing-place, overturning a half-dozen commissionaires,
each of whom swore he was the man that
said good-morning the day previous, and became thereby

entitled to his five francs (for no one need imagine that
he will land at Malta without paying, at least, three commissionaires
and five porters, if he carry no baggage on
shore, or twice as many, if he have one portmanteau),
I parted from Fra Giovanni, with a warm pressure of the
hand, a low “God bless you,” and a long, earnest look
out of those eyes of John the-Saint.

When the Nubia swung up on the port-chain, with her
head to the opening of the harbor, and ran out to sea,
she passed close under the Lower Barracka, so close that
I could recognize faces on it. In the corner, by the monument
of Sir Alexander Ball, I saw my friend. As he
recognized me, he waved his hand toward me, and even
in that motion I caught his intent; for he, good Catholic
that he was, could not let me, his heretic friend, go to
sea, and especially to the East, without that last sign of
the redemption by way of benediction. I thanked him
for it, for he meant it lovingly, and so I was away for
the Orient. We met again at the Holy Sepulchre.

Such was my step from the modern world to the ancient.
From good old Presbyterian habits and friends to
the companionship and affection of a Franciscan brother
among the relics of the mediæval world, and then to the
heart of Orient; Cairo the Magnificent, el Kahira the Victorious.

There is a comfort, when traveling eastward, in meeting
Englishmen. You are very certain, in coming in
contact with the English pleasure-traveler, to meet a gentleman.
Exceptions are very rare. It is also worthy of
remark, that the English gentleman, so soon as he learns
that you are American, regards you as a fit companion,
which is a degree of confidence that he is very far from
reposing in one of his own nationality. Englishmen meeting
Englishmen, look on one another as so many pickpockets
might, each of whom was certain that each of his
neighbors meant to rob him on the first available opportunity.

This perhaps arises from the danger that foreign acquaintances
may entail unpleasant and impracticable recognitions
at home. There is no apprehension of this in
meeting Americans, and this may serve to explain a willingness
to find society for the time which will not prove
troublesome in the future.

But I am disposed to give our cousins over the water
more credit for kindred affection. I have always found
them cordial, warm-hearted, frank and hearty companions
and friends. I was, perhaps, fortunate in those whom I
met, but they were many, lords, spiritual and temporal,
soldiers, sailors, and shop-keepers; and I found the name

of American a pass to their hearts. Some had friends in
our new country, and perhaps I had seen and known
them—and once or twice I had—all had an idea that we
were a race of brave and active men, given to boasting,
but good-natured at that, nearly related to them in blood,
and allies of England as champions of freedom against the
despotisms of the world.

This last idea was one of new and startling force to me,
as I looked back from Europe and the East to England
and America. The line between freedom and tyranny
runs up the British Channel. It is not the broad Atlantic.
Our Constitution is of English origin, based on
English law, and the boast which we inherit from our
revolutionary patriots was, that Britons would never be
slaves.

The sea was still. From Marseilles to Malta, in the
little mail steamer Valetta, we had experienced a constant
gale, sailing almost all the way under water. Ladies had
nearly died from the exhaustion of sea-sickness. The day
that we passed the straits of Bonifacio was the worst in
my memory of bad days at sea. All day long the sea
went over us, fore and aft. To live below deck was impossible,
the foul air of the little steamer close shut and
battened down being poisonous. The ladies who were
sea-sick were brought on deck and laid on island cushions
around which the water washed back and forth. Here day
and night for seventy hours they moaned and shrieked. One
of them we thought hourly would die. Miriam and Amy,
our American ladies, were brave and good sailors, but the
scene was almost too much for them. The gale saw us
into the port of Malta, and then flattened down to a calm,
and never was there such a beautiful sea as we sailed over
to Alexandria. No wind disturbed the profound beauty
of that water whose azure I had never before dreamed of.
It was a never-ending source of pleasure to lean over the

side and gaze into the deep blue, that surpassed the sky
in richness, on which the bubbles from the swift prow
went dancing gayly before as, white flashing and vanishing,
to be followed by others and others, all day and all
night long.

The poop cabin had been by some odd chance left vacant,
and I had secured it for Miriam and Amy. In a
season when the through India passengers crowded the
line of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, this was a
most fortunate and unexpected occurrence. The cabin
was much the pleasantest on shipboard, and they slept in
it enough to make up their losses on the Valetta.

I passed the night on deck, and could wake at any hour
and recognize the stars over me, that had so often seen
me sleeping in western wanderings. The old Englishman
who had the wheel on the starboard watch on the first
night out from Malta, when he saw the rolling a blanket
around me and lying down on a bench, grunted a disapproval
of it to himself, and even ventured to his mate at
the wheel a remark to the detriment of my eyes, expressing
also his belief that I would go below before morning.
How he came to be on the watch in the morning I don't
know, but he expressed unmitigated delight at my visual
organs being unaffected by his remarks, when he saw me
start up before the break of dawn in the east, and throw
off my blanket and sleep together, while I walked over
to the rail and watched to see the coming day.

Let him who would see the magnificence of dawn behold
it in the Levant, off the coast of the Pentapolis. It
is no matter for wonder that the ancients had such glorious
ideas of Aurora and her train. The first rays over the
blue horizon were splendid. I gazed to see if Jerusalem
itself were not the visible origin of that splendor. Then
swift in the track of his rays, came the gorgeous sun,
springing out of the sea like a god of triumph, and he

went up into the heavens with a majestic pomp that the
sun has nowhere but just here. There was on board the
ship a Pharsee, with his servants. I did not wonder at
that longing gaze with which I saw him looking at his
rising god. I, too, had I been taught as he, would die a
worshiper of that god of light.

The second-class passengers were a motley crowd.
Italian, Maltese, French, Greek, Arab, and Lascar, they
lay in heaps along the deck until the pumps sent the water
flooding over them when the decks were washed, and
then climbed into the rigging and sunned themselves dry.
I held a general levee among them every forenoon, examining
their various developments, and ended it with a
handful of cigars on deck, which transformed the crowd
into a mass of legs and arms, their heads being absolutely
invisible in the mêlée. The first day there grew four separate
fights out of this generosity of mine, and the second
day three. I omitted it the third, but there were six
combats on that morning, and I would have resumed the
practice on the fourth morning but that we were in the
harbor of Alexandria.

Among the passengers were two major-generals in the
East India Company's service, one of whom was capital
company. I usually had possession of the port side of
the after skylight deck, which being lifted up at each end
to allow air in the cabin below, made a very comfortable
lounge. As it was close to the poop cabin, I furnished it
easily with cushions and pillows, and we were accustomed
to make this our reception-room of an afternoon. The
general enjoyed a talk about America, by way of introduction
to a story, and stories, by himself about India and
the Indians, which he much delighted to relate, and to
which, I confess, I was not unwilling to listen.

The Scene on the deck of the steamer at such times
was the gayest imaginable; unlike any other great line

of travel, either by sea or land, in that the ladies on board
seemed to vie with each other in the elegance of their
afternoon dresses. Here lay on a pile of cushions a lady
of rare and delicate beauty, dressed in white from head
to foot, her dress the finest lawns and laces of exquisite
texture; while, by way of contrast or foil to her beauty,
an Indian servant, black as an African, and dressed in
crimson, with a long piece of yellow cloth wound around
his head and shoulders stood fanning his mistress. There
stood a group of young ladies, all in black, but all richly
dressed and every neck gleaming with jewels; while a
half-dozen young men, officers and civilians intermingled,
were making the neighborhood intolerable by their incessant
flow of nonsense. Two English generals, with their
families, were on deck, and a Portuguese governor-general,
with his suite, outward-bound to the possessions of
Portugal in the Indies. Children were playing everywhere,
and officers hastening hither or thither found
themselves constantly entangled in the games of the young
ones, or lost in circles of laughing girls, or actually made
fast by the endless questions of some elderly mother of a
family.

And when the sun went down in the sea, our fellow-
passenger, the Pharsee, might be seen on the distant forecastle,
standing calmly with folded arms and steadfast
eyes fixed on his descending god, and following his course
with fixed countenance long after he had disappeared, as
if he could penetrate the very earth itself with that adoring
gaze. And it did not seem strange here that he
should worship that orb. I, too, began to feel that there
was something grand, majestic—almost like a god—in the
everlasting circuit of the sun above these seas. Day by
day—day by day—for thousands of years, the eye of his
glory had seen the waves of the Great Sea. The Phœnician
sailors, Cadmus, Jason—all the bold navigators

that are known in song and story—he had watched and
guided to port or destruction.

Is it the same great sun that looks down on American
forests? Is it the same sun that has shone on me when
I slept at noonday on the rocky shores of the Delaware,
or whose red departure I have watched from the hills
of Minnesota? The same sun that beheld the glory of
Nineveh, the fall of Persepolis, the crumbling ruins of the
Acropolis? In such lands, on such seas as this, he is a
poor man, poor in imagination and the power of enjoyment,
who does not have new ideas of the grandeur of
the sun that has shone on the birth, magnificence, burial,
and forgotten graves of so many nations. Well as men
have marked them, tall as they have builded their monuments,
broad and deep as they have laid their foundations,
none know them now save the sun and stars, that
have marked them day by day with unforgetful visitation.
And when the day was gone, and the night, with
its deep blue filled with ten thousand more stars than I
had ever seen before, was above us, I wrapped my
plaid around me, and disdaining any other cover than
that glorious canopy, I slept on deck and dreamed of
home.

I say I slept and dreamed. It was pleasant though
fitful sleep, and I woke at dawn. It could not be otherwise.
From my childhood, the one longing desire to
visit Egypt and the Holy Land grew on me with my
growth. It entered into all my plans of life—all my
prospects for the future. I talked of it often, thought
of it oftener, dreamed of it nightly for years. One and
another obstacle was removed, and I began to see before
me the immediate realization of my hopes. It would be
idle to say my heart did not beat somewhat faster when
I saw the blue line of the American horizon go down behind
the sea. It would still be more idle to say, that I

did not weep sometimes—tears that were not childish—when
I remembered the silent parting from those dear
lips that had taught me for thirty years to love the land
that God's footsteps had hallowed, and whose eyes looked
so longingly after me as I hastened away. (God granted
never again those dear embraces.) It would be idle
to deny that in my restless sleep on the Atlantic in the
narrow cabin, my gentle Miriam, who slept less heavily,
heard me sometimes speak strange words that might
have puzzled others, but which she, as the companion of
my studies, recognized as the familiar names of holy
places.

But notwithstanding all this, I did not, in my calm,
waking hours, feel that I was approaching eastern climes
and classic or sacred soil until I had left Malta, and felt
the soft north wind coming down from Greece. That
first night on the Nubia was full of it. I could not sleep
more than half an hour at a time, and then I would start
up wide awake, with the idea that some one had spoken
to me; and once, I could not doubt it, I heard as plainly
as if it were real, my father's voice—as I have heard it
often and often—reading from the old prince and father
of song.

Just before daybreak I crossed the deck and bared my
forehead to a soft, faint breeze that stole over the sea.
The moon lay in the west. The night was clear, and I
could read as if it were day. I leaned on the rail, and
looked up to windward, where, here and there, I could
see the white caps of the thousand waves, silvered in the
light of the purest moon I ever saw , and thinking of my
friend, Fra Giovanni, and of my first meeting with him,
and yielding to the temptation of a quotation, where no
one was near to hear me and to call it pedantic, I began
to recite that other splendid passage from the Prometheus,

which was born in the poet's brain on this identical water
which now rolled around me:

“And what's the use of calling on them?” said a clear,
pleasant voice behind me, as I started around to recognize
one of the English generals whom I have mentioned
as with us on the ship.

“I say, what's the use of calling on them when they
won't come? Times are changed. There are no gods
in Greece now, and, by Jupiter, no men either, and the
river nymphs are all gone; and the smiles of the waves,
look at them—they come when they will, and go where
they will; but the good old days of poetry are gone,
gone, gone! Even as the glory of yonder cities is
gone!” And he pointed to the southern horizon, where
I now saw the low line of the coast of Africa for the first
time. We were just seventeen hours from Malta when
we came up with it. It was Cape Arabat, and here were
the cities of the Pentapolis. Here was Berenice the
beautiful; Ptolemais was here and Cyrene. That long
line of sand, deserted and desolate, was all that I was to
see of their grandeur; but I was not sorry that my first
view of Africa should be connected with such associations.

In the forenoon we lost sight of land again, and were
then left to our own resources in the ship. The sea was
in a generous humor. From the hour we left Malta there
was almost a flat calm. We did not suffer a moment's
discomfort, and I think there was not a case of sea-sickness
on board.

Around our cabin doors, on the after deck, we assembled
a gay group daily. The ship's band made pleasant
music for us in the afternoons and evenings, once delighting

us with “Hail Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle,”
which sounded the more home-like for the unexpectedness
of those familiar sounds on an English ship along
the coast of Africa.

Night after night came over us with never-diminishing
wealth of beauty, and each successive dawn and sunrise
woke me from deep slumber on the deck of the vessel.
Thursday evening came. At midnight the deck was deserted,
and I was alone. In that soft air and exquisite
climate I preferred the deck to my cabin, and had made
my bed every night on the planks under the sky. This
night I could not sleep. The restlessness of which I have
spoken had increased as we approached the shore of
Egypt, and I walked the deck steadily for an hour, and
then threw myself into one of the dozen large chairs
which, in the day-time, were the private property of as
many English ladies. At one o'clock I heard the officer
of the deck discussing the power of his eyesight, and
springing to the rail, I saw clearly, on the starboard bow,
the light of the Pharos at Alexandria.

You may be curious to know what were my emotions
at the visible presence of Egypt before my eyes, and the
evidence that I should tread its soil to-morrow. I did
not pause to think of the magnificence of the old Pharos
which this one replaces, or of the grandeur that made it
one of the seven wonders of the world. The great mirror
that exhibited vessels a hundred miles at sea; the
lofty tower that shone in the nights of those old centuries,
almost on the rocky shores of Crete; the palaces that
lined the shore and stretched far out into the blue Mediterranean;
none of these were in my mind.

Enough to say that, before I thought of this as the
burial-place of the mighty son of Philip; before I thought
of it as the residence of the most beautiful of queens; the
abode of luxury and magnificence surpassing all that the

world had seen or will see; before the remembrance of
the fabled Proteus, or even the great Julius came to my
mind, I was seated in my chair, my head bowed down on
my breast, and before my vision swept a train of old men
of lordly mien, each man kingly in his presence and bearing,
yet each man in his life poor, lowly, if not despised.
I saw the old Academician, his white locks flowing on
the wind, and the Stagyrite, the mighty man of all old or
modern philosophy, and a host of the great men of learning,
whose names are lost now. And last in that visionary
procession—calmer, more stately than the rest, with
clear bright eye fixed on the heaven where last of all he
saw the flashing footsteps of the angels that bore away
his Lord, with that bright light around his white forehead
that crowned him a prince and king on earth and in
heaven—I saw Mark, the Apostle of Him whom Plato
longed to see and Aristotle died ignorant of.

With daybreak came the outlines of the shore and the
modern city of Iskandereyeh, conspicuous above all being
the Pillar of Diocletian, known to modern fame as Pompey's
Pillar. We lay outside all night waiting for a pilot.
The only benefit to be derived from the modern lighthouse
at Alexandria is its warning not to approach the
harbor, which is entered by a winding channel among innumerable
reefs and rocks. We threw rockets, burned
blue-lights, and fired cannon; but an Egyptian pilot is
not to be aroused before sunrise, and it was, therefore,
two hours after daylight before he came off to us, and we
entered the port on the west side of the city.

The instant that the anchor was dropped, a swarm, like
the locusts of Egypt, of all manner of specimens of the
human animal, poured up the sides of the ship and covered
the deck from stem to stern. It would be vain to
attempt to describe them. Moors, Egyptians, Bedouins,
Turks, Nubians, Maltese, nondescripts—white, black, yellow,

copper-colored, and colorless—to the number of two
or three hundred, dressed in as many costumes, convinced
us that we were in a new country for us. There
were many who wore elegant and costly dresses, but the
large majority were of the poorest sort, and poverty here
seems to make what we call poverty at home positive
wealth.

Of a hundred or more of this crowd, the dress of each
man consisted of one solitary article of clothing—a shirt of
coarse cotton cloth, reaching not quite to the knees, and
this so thin as to reveal the entire outline of the body,
while it was usually so ragged as to leave nothing to be
complained of in the way of extra clothing. They went
to work like horses, and I never saw men exhibit such
feats of strength. The cargo of the ship was to be got
out as rapidly as possible. Five dollars a day is ample
pay for a hundred of these men. A piastre and a half
(about eight cents) is the highest rate of wages in Egypt.

With the crowd who came on board were the usual
number of anxious and officious dragomans.

The word dragoman, derived from turgoman, and
meaning simply an interpreter, has gotten to signify a
sort of courier, valet, servant, adviser, and traveling companion,
all combined, on whom the Oriental traveler must
expect to be dependent for his very subsistence from day
to day, from and after the moment he becomes attached
to him.

A friend of mine, speaking of the servants, was accustomed
to call them “the young ladies who boarded with
his mother.” The dragoman may be defined as the gentleman
who travels with you. He becomes a part of
yourself, goes where you go, sleeps where you sleep, you
talk through him, buy through him (and pay him and
through him at the same time), and, in point of fact, you
become his servant. All this, if you choose. But, if you

choose otherwise, you may make him what he should be,
a very good servant, and nothing more. He who can
not manage his own servants should stay at home and
not travel. The man whose servant can cheat him,
should not keep servants, or should submit to his own
stupidity.

I may as well pause here, to advise the Egyptian traveler
under no circumstances to take a dragoman until he
reaches Cairo. He will find English, French, and Italian,
spoken everywhere in Alexandria, and on the railway to
Cairo, so that he will need no assistance until he begins
to make his arrangements to go up the Nile; which he
should. not make in Alexandria.

One of the importunate, who came on board the Nubia,
may serve as an example of the rest.

He was as Nubian, black and shining; dressed in the
Nizam costume, embroidered jacket, silk vest, and flowing
trowsers, all of dark green. He offered a handful of
testimonials, but I rejected these, and asked him a question
for the sake of getting rid of him.

“What languages do you speak?”

“All de kinds. I had school went to—sixty, seventy
year. I ought know.”

“Perhaps you ought, but you won't do for me.”

I had observed a respectable-looking Maltese, who was
the commissionaire for Cesar Tortilla's Hotel d' Europe.
Placing the baggage in his charge, we made our way
down into a boat, and tall, half-naked Arab, standing up
to his oars, pulled us slowly in to the crowded landing-
place at the custom-house of Alexandria.

Here I entered Egypt; and, at this same spot, on a
moony midnight five months later, I departed for the
Holy Land.

Alexandria is a strange medley. The West and the
East have met and intermarried in her streets. The great
square presents the most singular spectacle that can be
imagined in any city of Orient or sunset, from the strange
commingling of races, nations, costumes, and animals.
The great modern institution of Egypt is the donkey, especially
to American eyes.

The Egyptian donkey is the smallest imaginable animal
of the species. The average height is from three feet and
a half to four feet, though large numbers of them are
under three feet. These little fellows carry incredible
loads, and apparently with ease. In the square were
scores of them. Here an old Turk, fat and shaky, his feet
reaching to within six inches of the ground, went trotting
across the square; there a dozen half naked boys, each
perched between two goat-skins of water. Four or five
English sailors, full of wonderment at the novel mode of
travel, were plunging along at a fast gallop, and got foul
of the old Turk. The boys, one of whom always follows
his donkey, however swift the pace, belaboring him with
a stick, and ingeniously poking him in the ribs or under
the saddle-strap, commenced beating each other. Two
ladies and two gentlemen, India passengers, taking their
first donkey ride, became entangled in the group. Twenty

long-legged, single-shirted fellaheen rushed up, some with
donkeys and some with long rods. A row of camels
stalked slowly by, and looked with quiet eyes at the increasing
din; and when the confusion seemed to be inextricable,
a splendid carriage dashed up the square, and
fifty yards in advance of it ran, at all the speed of a swift
horse, an elegantly-dressed runner, waving his silver rod,
and shouting to make way for the high and mighty
Somebody; and forthwith, in a twinkling, the mass scattered
in every direction, and the square was free again.
The old Turk ambled along his way, and the sailors surrounded
one of their number who had managed to lose his
seat in the hubbub, and whose curses were decidedly
home-like.

No one could be contented in Alexandria more than
fifteen minutes without going to Pompey's Pillar, as fame
has it, or the Pillar of Diocletian, as it is now more frequently
and properly called.

Leaving the ladies to their baths and a late breakfast,
we mounted donkeys at the door, and being joined by a
half dozen English officers bound to India, who were detained
in Alexandria for the train until evening, we dashed
off up the square at a furious gallop; furious in appearance,
but the rate of progress was about equal to a slow
trot on horseback. Nevertheless, a donkey carrying a
heavy American on his back has some momentum when
he gallops, as the guard in the gateway found to his cost;
for he was dozing, after the prescribed manner of an
Egyptian noon-day doze, and he dreamed that he heard
the Frenchmen coming again, as they came once in his
time; and before he had time to pick up his scattered intellect
he had more to do in picking up himself, for we
went over him like a thunder-storm, rattling on the draw-bridge,
across an open space, through another gateway,
across another draw-bridge, and so out into a long, broad

street, on each side of which was a row of acacia trees
(known as the sont), and so to a hill that overlooks the
city and the harbor, on which stands this solitary column,
the lonesome relic of unknown grandeur. Of what it
formed a part, whether of the great library, or of some
gorgeous temple, no one knows.

We sat down in the dust and looked up at its massive
proportions, and admired and wondered, as hundreds of
thousands have looked and admired in past years, and
commented as they had, and dreamed as they had.

Shall I confess it? There was an Arab girl, who came
from a mud village close by, and who stood at a little
distance gazing at us, whose face attracted more of my
attention than this mysterious column, in whose shade I
sat. She was tall, slender, graceful as a deer, and her
face exceedingly beautiful. She was not more than fourteen.
She was dressed in the style of the country; a
single blue cotton shirt. As it was a female who wore it,
perhaps it deserves another name; but that will answer,
since the sex did not vary the pattern. It was open from
the neck to the waist, exposing the bust, and it reached
but to her knees. She stood erect, with a proud uplifted
head, and to my imagination she answered well for a personification
of the angel of the degraded country in which
I found myself. The ancient glory was here, but, clothed
in the garb of poverty, she was reduced to be an outcast
among the nations of the earth.

As I sat on the sand and looked at her, I put out my
hand to support myself, and it fell on a skull. Bones,
whether of ancient or modern Egyptians I knew not
then, lay scattered around.

When I would have apostrophised the brown angel, she
started in affright, and vanished in a hut built of most
unromantic materials, such, indeed, as lay sun-drying all
around us. It was gathered in the streets, and dried

in cakes, which served the purpose of fuel, and occasionally
of house building. Six naked children of eight years
old and under remained. No imagination could make
them other than the filthy wretches they were. Here we
learned the sound of that word which is omnipotent in
Turkish lands, and which travelers now too much ridicule,
as if its benefits belonged to the beggar.

Before the gate of El Azhar, in Cairo, I whispered it in
the ear of the Sheik, and it opened the old college to my
profane feet. At the mosque of Machpelah, in Hebron,
I said “Bucksheesh” to the venerable guardian of the
place, and though five hundred howling Arabs were outside
the door shouting for him to bring me out to them,
he said: “Come in the night, when these dogs are sleeping,
and I will show you the tomb of Ibrahim.” I sent it
by my dragoman to the Bim-pasha of Jerusalem, and he
gave me fifty soldiers, and marched me through every
corner of the mosque of Omar, or the Mesjid El Aksa.

It is a magic word, of value to be known: spoken interrogatively,
it is offensive; spoken suggestively, it is
powerful. If you doubt it, try it, as I have.

I have said that I did not sleep on board the ship the
night before. Neither did I sleep on shore the first night
in Egypt. But the cause of my wakefulness was different.
Dogs abound in the city of the son of Philip. They
have no special owners, and are a sort of public property,
always respected. But such infernal dog-fights as occurred
once an hour under our windows no one elsewhere
has known or heard of. I counted fifteen dogs in one
mêlée the first evening, each fighting, like an Irishman in
a fair, on his own account.

Besides this, the watchmen of the city are a nuisance.
There are a large number of them, and some twenty are
stationed in and around the grand square. Every quarter
of an hour, the chief of a division enters the square

and shouts his call, which is a prolonged cry, to the
utmost extent of his breath. As he commences, each
watchman springs into the square; and by the time he
has exhausted his breath they take up the same shout in
a body, and reply. He repeats it, and they again reply;
and all is then still for fifteen minutes. But as if this
were not enough, there was a tall gaunt fellow, who had
once been a dragoman, but was a poor and drunken dog
now, and in fact, crazy from bad habits, who slept somewhere
in the square every night, and who invariably
echoed the watchmen with a yell that rang down the
square, in unmistakable English, “all right;” and once I
heard him add, in the same tremendous tones, “Damn
the rascals!”

And just before the dawn, when the law of Mohammed
prescribed it, at that moment that a man could distinguish
between a white thread and a black, there was a sound
which now came to my ears with a sweetness that I can
not find words to express. In a moment of the utmost
stillness, when all the earth, and air, and sky was calm
and peaceful, a voice fell through the solemn night, clear,
rich, prolonged, but in a tone of rare melody that thrilled
through my ears, and I needed no one to tell me that it
was the muezzin's call to prayer. “There is no God but
God!” said the voice, in the words of the Book of the
Law given on the mountain of fire, and our hearts answered
the call to pray.

My first business in Alexandria was to get on shore,
from the steamer, the various articles which we had purchased
at Marseilles and Malta for a winter on the
Nile. One of these, a cask of Marsala wine—Wood-
house's best—must necessarily pass through the custom-
house, and I was not sorry to have an opportunity of
witnessing the fashion of collecting the revenue of the
Viceroy of Egypt. The cask had been landed from the

Nubia , and, as all the other goods here landed, was in
the public stores of the custom-house. Business is transacted
in Arabic or Italian, or in the mixed Arabic and
Italian which forms the Maltese. We—that is, Trumbull
and I, accompanied by a servant and interpreter—went
first to look for the wine. Having found it, I was
amused at the simple fashion of getting it through the
business which, in other countries, is made so needlessly
tedious.

A tall Nubian, black as night, looked at the barrel,
weighed it with his eye (it was over two hundred
weight), twisted a cord around it, and wound the cord
around his head, taking the strain on his forehead, and
then, with a swing of his giant body, he had it on his
back, and followed us to the inspector. This gentleman,
an old Turk, with a beard not quite as heavy as my own,
but much more gray, addressed us very pleasantly in
Italian, and passed us along to his clerk, who sat by his
side, each with his legs invisible under him. The proper
certificate of the contents was here made, and sealed—
for Turk or Copt never writes his name, impressing it
on the paper with ink on a seal—and the black carried
the wine to the scales to be weighed. This was done in
an instant, the weight noted, and another man received
the duty, whereupon it was ready to be carried up to the
hotel. All this was done in fifteen minutes or less, and
the majesty of the viceroy and ourselves were equally
well satisfied.

My next business was with the viceroy himself, and its
object to procure a firman which should enable me to
make excavations among the ruins of Upper Egypt. Mr.
De Leon, who so successfully fills the post of American
consul in Egypt, was absent on a visit to Greece. This
consulate is by far the most important foreign consular
appointment of our government, since it amounts to a

Chargéship, the Egyptian government being, in all commercial
matters, independent of the Porte, and receiving
communications through the consul direct. The
power of this functionary is absolutely startling to an
American, who suddenly finds himself in a land where he
has no protection from the government, no obedience to
render to it, where he is not liable to punishment for any
offence against its laws, and where, in fact, he may commit
wholesale murder with no penalty other than being
sent out of the country by the American consul. I
shall speak further of this in another place, and I allude
to it here only to say that Mr. De Leon is most remarkably
successful in his difficult and responsible position,
having secured the confidence of the government, and
thus enabled himself more effectually to protect travelers,
who find themselves in constant need of some strong
friend to appeal to the government in their aid.

During his absence the seal of the consulate was in the
custody of Mr. Petersen, the vice-consul of Sweden and
Norway, and I take this opportunity of expressing my
thanks to him for his unremitting kindness and attention
to us during our stay in Alexandria.

On my representing to him my wishes, and presenting
the papers on which I relied for the furtherance of my
application, he went immediately to the viceroy, and
within the forenoon of the day sent to me the desired
paper, which was a letter directed to Latif Pasha, governor
of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia, resident at Es Siout,
requiring him to furnish me with all necessary papers and
assistance, letters to inferior governors and officers of
whatever grade, and to provide men and beasts as I
should demand, at any point on the river.

The cost of this paper was a polite “thank you,”
which I repeat here, as well to Mr. Petersen as to
the Egyptian government. How invaluable it afterward

proved to me I shall frequently have occasion to describe.
Without reference to its usefulness for the immediate
objects of my visit to Egypt, it operated as an
introduction to all men of rank in the upper country,
and enabled me to become acquainted with some whose
friendship is among the pleasantest recollections of my
winter on the Nile, as well as the pleasantest anticipations
of a return.

Alexandria has been visited by many travelers, and is
described in all the books on Egypt, but with the exception
of the Pillar of Diocletian (Pompey's Pillar) and
Cleopatra's Needles, there are no antiquities which have
attracted their attention.

The modern city stands on a neck of land, to the eastward
of which is the old and deserted harbor, and on
the west the new, and rather inaccessible, but safe anchorage
in which vessels of every nation are found. As
a port, it is one of the most important on the Mediterranean,
especially as the western terminus of the Suez
railway, which is soon to be completed across the isthmus;
and which renders the proposed canal, across the
isthmus, more than ever undesirable. The chief trade
of the port is in coals from England, and grain and cotton
thither.

But around modern Alexandria, in all directions, lie
mounds of yellow dust and sand, destitute of the slightest
vegetation, and burning in the hot sun. Under
these mounds lie the ruins of the city of the Ptolemies.
Excavations are carried on continually, but only to obtain
stone for building purposes, to be used in walls or
burned for lime. No investigations have been made by
antiquarians, as yet, among these hills, where there is,
without doubt, a rich store of treasure to be opened.
Here, indeed, but little of the very ancient is to be expected.
It was in the later days of Egypt, when the

Pharaohs had been succeeded by the Ptolemies, when
Memphis was old, and Thebes was crumbling into ruin,
that the Alexandrian splendor filled the eastern, though
it was then called the western, world.

I had no desire to spend time or money here, further
than to take one step backward in time before I found
myself treading the halls of Remeses.

The Pillar of Diocletian I have already mentioned.
The Needles of Cleopatra, as they have been long called,
are in their old sites, one standing erect where the spray
of the sea washes over it, in the eastern part of the city,
the other lying on the ground, almost under ground indeed,
near it. But not being in their original positions,
having been brought here in Roman times, they possess
but little more interest than that at Paris, scarcely so
much as those at Rome.

The Baths of Cleopatra, as they are called, ancient
tombs open and partially sunken in the sea, on the west
side of the city, are interesting only as deserted tombs,
without name or mark. Having visited these, we supposed
the antiquities of Alexandria were “done.”

But the Maltese Abrams, whom I have mentioned, and
whom I recommend as a capital servant, told us of certain
catacombs that he knew of, three miles east of the
city on the sea shore, where the natives were digging
lime-stone for building purposes and for burning. Accordingly
we rode out one day to look at them.

It proved a fortunate discovery, especially as on my return
to Alexandria I found that these catacombs were entirely
dug away and all appearance of them had vanished,
although there remain doubtless many tombs under the
ground never yet reached, for future explorers to open.

We were no novices in donkey-riding by this time;
you would have supposed that we were used to riding
them all our lives, had you seen the four which we mounted,

and the speed at which we dashed down the long
street that leads to the Rosetta gate, followed by our
four boys, shouting and screaming to the groups of people
walking before us. We raised a cloud of dust all the
way, and elicited not a few Mohammedan curses from
women with vailed faces, whose black eyes flashed contempt
on the bare faces of Amy and Miriam. Now
working to windward of a long row of camels laden with
stone, now to leeward of a gathering of women around a
fruit-stall, now passing a funeral procession that went
chanting their songs along the middle of the way—we
dashed, in a confused heap, donkeys and boys, through
the arched gateway, to the terror of the Pasha's soldiers
who sat smoking under the shade, and who had heard
doubtless of our victory over the guard on the first day,
across the draw-bridge with a thunder that you would
not have believed the donkey's hoof could have extracted
from the plank, through the second arch, and out into the
desolate tract of land, without grass, or tree, or living
object for miles, where once stood the palaces of the city
of Cleopatra.

Winding our way over the mounds of earth that concealed
the ruins, catching sight here and there of a projecting
cornice, a capital, or a slab of polished stone, we
at length descended to the shore at the place where the
men were now engaged in digging out stone for lime and
buildings in the modern city.

Formerly the shore for a mile or more must have been
bordered by a great necropolis, all cut in solid rock.
During a thousand years the entire shore has sunk, I
have no means of estimating how much, but not less than
thirty feet, as I judge from a rough observation; it may
have been fifty, or even more. By this many of the rock-hewn
tombs have been submerged entirely, and those on
shore have been depressed, and many of them thrown out

of perpendicular, while the rock has been cracked, and
sand has filled the subterranean chambers. Of the period
at which these tombs were commenced we have no means
now of judging. It is sufficiently manifest, however, that
they have served the purposes of successive generations
of nations, if I may use the expression; and have in turn
held Egyptians, who were removed to make room for
Romans, who themselves slept only until the Saracens
needed places for their long sleep.

Already great numbers of tombs had been opened and
their contents scattered. The fellaheen who were at work
proceeded rapidly in their Vandalish business. Some long
corridors stood open in the white limestone of the hill,
and broken pottery and innumerable bones lay scattered
around. An afternoon was consumed in the first mere looking
at these catacombs. Returning the next morning, we
selected a spot where the workmen had gone deepest,
and hired a dozen men to work under our direction.
Miriam and Amy sat in a niche of an open tomb, shaded
from the sun, and looking out at the sea, which broke
with a grand surf at their very feet.

After breaking into three in succession of the unopened
niches, we at length struck on one which had evidently
escaped Saracen invasion. It was in the lowest tier of
three on the side of an arched chamber, protected by a
heavy stone slab inlaid in cement. It required gunpowder
to start it. The tomb was about two feet six inches
wide by the same height, and extended seven feet into
the rock. The others on all sides of the room were of
the same dimensions. There were in all twenty-four.

Upon opening this and entering it, we found a skeleton
lying at full length, in remarkable preservation, evidently
that of a man in the prime of life. At his head stood an
alabaster vase, plainly but beautifully cut, in perfect preservation,
and as pure and white as if carved but yesterday.

The height of the vase is seventeen and a half
inches, the greatest diameter nine and a half inches.

It consisted of four different pieces—the pedestal, the
main part of the vase, the cover, and the small knob or
handle on the top; not broken but so cut originally.

This vase Mr. Trumbull subsequently shipped to America,
where I am happy to say it arrived safely. (The cut
at the end of this chapter exhibits the form of this vase.)

Pursuing our success, we removed the bones of the
dead man, reserving only a few to go with the vase, and
then searched carefully the floor of the tomb, which was

EARTHEN VASE FOUND AT ALEXANDRIA.

covered with fine dust and sand. Here we at length hit
on the top of another vase; and after an hour of careful
and diligent work, we took out from a deep sunk hole in
the rock, scarcely larger than itself, an Etruscan vase,
which on opening we found to contain burned bones and

ashes, as fresh in appearance as if but yesterday deposited.

This vase or urn is fifteen inches high, and its largest
diameter is eleven inches. It is of fine earthenware ornamented
with flowers and devices.

This vase was too fragile to attempt to send to America,
and I left it with Mr. De Leon. The reader will observe
the peculiar position of this vase, in the bottom of a
tomb under the bones of a dead man. There was another
similar hole in the same tomb, but no vase in it. In the
bottom of another tomb were found another alabaster urn
similarly sunken. It was of ungraceful shape, being
simply a tub with a cover.

In one of the lowest excavations we found a tomb
which was painted in ancient Egyptian style, but it was
so filled with damp sand that nothing remained of the
paintings except near the roof which was arched and
plastered. There was nothing to indicate the period of
its occupation, but it is interesting as being the only tomb
I have ever heard of as discovered at Alexandria which
was of ancient Egyptian character. All the sarcophagi
and tombs hitherto found here have been considered of
Greek or Roman period. This, however, was unmistakable,
the heads and upper parts of the figures being as
brilliant and fresh as the tombs at Thebes. Being on a
much lower level than any other that we penetrated, it
was possibly of ante-Greek times; but it may have been
the tomb of an Egyptian who retained ancient customs
after Greek dates.

With this we finished our day's labor, then strolled
along the shore, and looked at the gorgeous sunset, right
over the Pharos, and then mounting our donkeys, and carrying
our vases and sundry pieces of broken pottery in our
hands, we rode slowly into the city. I wondered whether
the old Greek or Roman whose burned bones I was shaking

about in the vase on the pommel of my donkey-saddle
had any idea of the curious resurrection he was undergoing
in modern Iskandereyeh, or whether it disturbed
him beyond the Styx when I shook out his ashes on a copy
of the London Times spread on the floor of Cæsar Tortilla's
Hôtel d'Europe. Cæsar is a good fellow by-the-by,
and his hotel admirable for the East.

The next morning we were up and away at an earlier
hour, but fearing to fatigue the ladies too much by a second
long ride, we took a carriage to drive out as near as
possible to the catacombs. It was not the Oriental fashion.
We had no right to try it. The driver said he could
do it easily, he had done it before, and lied like an Italian
about it, so that we trusted him. We had hardly gone
out of the Rosetta gate, and turned up the first hill over
the ruins of the ancient city, when one of the horses
baulked, and the carriage began backing, but instead of
backing straight, the forewheels cramped, and the first
plunge of the baulky horse forward took him and us over
the side of the bank and down a steep descent into an excavation.
The pole of the carriage snapped short off, the
other horse, dragged into the scrape by his companion, fell
down, and the carriage ran directly over him, and rested
on his body. The ladies sprang out as it stopped, and we
all reached the ground safely; but there was another ruin
on the top of the old ruins. It was, in point of fact, what
we call in America a total smash, and we sent back for
donkeys, while we amused ourselves with wandering over
the site of the old city.

This day I determined to go deeper into the vaults
of the catacombs, if possible, than before, and I commenced
on the side of the sea in the room that was
painted in the brilliant colors of the Egyptians. Setting
my men at work here by the light of candles, I was not
long in penetrating the bottom of the chamber by a hole

which opened into the roof of a similar room below. I
thrust myself through the hole as rapidly as possible, but
found that the earth had filled it to within three feet of
the top. Two hours' work cleared it out; but I found
nothing, for the dampness of the sea had reached it, and
all was destroyed except the solid walls.

A few moments later one of the men came to tell me
that they had opened a new gallery of tombs, and I hastened
to see it. Though not what I expected from their
description, it was sufficiently strange to be worth examining.

Crawling on my hands and knees about twenty feet
through an arched passage cut in the stone, and measuring
thirty-two inches in width by thirty-six in height
at the centre, I found myself in a chamber twenty-one feet
long by fifteen broad. The roof was a plain arch. Its
height it was impossible to tell, for the earth had sifted
into it through huge fissures in the rock, and by the slow
accumulation of two thousand years or less, had filled it
on one side to within eight feet of the roof. But the
earth had come in only on that side, and had run down in
a steep slope toward the other side, which was not so full
by fifteen feet. Nevertheless there was no floor visible
there, but the lowest stones in that wall were huge slabs
of granite, and on digging down I could see that the slope
of the earth ran under them, into what I have no doubt
was a stone staircase, arched with granite, leading down
into the catacombs below. The room was plastered plainly
with a smooth whitish-gray plaster on three sides. The
fourth side, that over the granite stairway, and, as I have
explained, the side where the earth was lowest, was solid
rock, with two immense shelves of rock, one six feet above
the other, left there in the excavation, and evidently intended
as places on which to stand funeral urns and vases.
But what struck me as most remarkable, was that a rough

projecting cornice was left across the chamber, corresponding
with the fronts of the shelves, in which were five
immense iron nails, or spikes, with heads measuring two
inches across. The heads of but two were left, the others

TOMB IN THE CATACOMBS OF ALEXANDRIA.

having rusted off. I could not imagine any object to
which these nails were applied, unless to hold planks
which may at some time have covered these shelves.

Upon the shelves were lying masses of broken pottery
and vases; but nothing perfect or valuable. I then proceeded
to strike the plastered walls with my hammer, and
at length found a place that sounded hollow. Two fellaheen
went to work instantly, and soon opened a niche
which had been walled up and plastered over. It was in
the usual shape, two feet eight inches wide, by three feet
high in the centre, and seven feet deep. In it lay a skeleton
and the dust of a dead man, nothing more. I proceeded,
and in an hour I had opened twelve similar niches,
or openings, some larger, and containing as many as three

skeletons each. It was a strange sensation that of crawling
into these resting-places of the dead of long ago on
my hands and knees, feeling the soft and moss-like crush
of the bones under me, and digging with my fingers in
the dust for memorials of its life and activity. My clothes,
my eyes, my throat, were covered and filled with the fine
dust of the dead, and I came out at length more of an
ancient than modern in external appearance.

During the process of my investigations the passageway
by which we had entered was darkened, and I soon
saw Miriam on her hands and knees, guided by an Egyptian
boy, creeping into the cavern to see what was going
on. Having opened all of three tiers of graves that were
above ground, I found between the tops of the niches
smaller niches, plastered over like the others, and containing
broken urns and the remains of burned bones. I
found nothing in all this gloomy series of graves but a few
lamps of earthenware, blackened about the hole for the
wick, sad emblems of departed light and life.

We came out from the vaults and walked down to the
beach, where the cool wind revived us. Four hundred
feet from the shore was a curious rocky island. Trumbull
and myself went out to it. It was full of open tombs, a
part of the great necropolis sunken in the sea, and all the
way from the shore we found traces of the same great
burial-place.

We left the catacombs again at sunset, and rode home
slowly over the hills. As we entered the gate of the
city we met a marriage procession, the bride surrounded
by her female friends on the way to her husband's house.
She carried on her head a huge box, or chest, containing
all her dower, and her friends shouted and sang as they
passed us. We quickened our speed as we approached
the great square, and dashed up to the door of the hotel
at a furious gallop. There the scene in the evening was

always the same. A crowd of donkey boys quarreling
with their employers for extra fees, shouts, curses in
countless languages, a perfect Babel of tongues, from
which it was a pleasure to escape to the cheerful dining-room
and the capital dinners that we always found there.

Alexandria , or Iskandereyeh, will amply repay the
traveler who visits it and goes no further. To find himself
in the land of bananas and palms, of prickly pears,
and almonds, and oranges, is enough alone to make the
trip across the Mediterranean worth while, and to this is
added the immediate association with the East, and the
intermixture of the oriental with the western, which is
sufficiently amusing to repay one for a week of sea-sickness.
Beside all this he is in the old world here—the
older world than Greece and Rome—for it is undeniable
that, long before this city of Alexandria was adopted by
the Greeks, there was a powerful and opulent city of the
Egyptians on this ground; and, underneath the mounds
around it, lie the remains of men and their achievements,
not alone of the centuries immediately prior to the
Christian era, but of the far remote ages of which we
can only hope to know the faintest outlines of history.

Perhaps, hereafter, some excavator, more fortunate
than I, may find in Alexandrian catacombs the history
of Rhacotis, the city which preceded Alexandria.

My time here was limited by engagements at Cairo.
To the traveler who wishes to see only the external appearance
of things, or to look only at the ground which
overlies old cities, or on which they once stood, one or

two days will suffice, as well as a month or a year, to see
the city of the Ptolemies. But we caught ourselves
often standing for an hour before a modern Egyptian
house, in the wall of which was worked a piece of old
marble, whose exquisite carving and polish proved it to
be a part of the old city; possibly from the pediment of a
temple; possibly from the boudoir of a lady; possibly
from the throne-chamber of a king. To me Alexandria
was deeply interesting. Conjecture—or, if you prefer
the phrase, imagination—was never idle as I passed
along the streets of the modern city, or over the mounds
that cover the ancient. It was most active in the tombs,
where we found the ashes of the men of Alexandria of
all periods in its eventful history, and the memorials of
their lives and deaths.

There was one small earthen lamp, one of a dozen which
we found in the catacombs, all alike in general form, and
every one blackened about the opening for the wick,
with the smoke of the last flame that went out in the
closed tomb.

Over that lamp I wasted, if you choose to call it waste,
many hours in the evening and night, sitting at the open
window of my room on the grand square, and listening
to the cry of the watchmen and the call of the muezzin
at the late hours of prayer. There was nothing peculiar
about it except a monogram on the top. It was
of the simplest form of ancient lamps, with a hole for the
oil and a smaller one for the wick; but there was on the
surface a cross, on one arm of which was a semicircle
rudely forming the Greek character Rho, the cross and
the letter together signifying the Xρ, the familiar abbreviation
of the name of our Lord. I know not how
many centuries that peaceful slumberer in His promises
had remained undisturbed; but when I saw that we had
broken the rest of one who slept in hope of the resurrection,

that we had rudely scattered on the winds of the sea
the ashes of one over whom, in the long gone years, had
been read the sublime words, “I am the resurrection
and the life,” perhaps by Cyril the great bishop, perhaps
by Mark himself—when I saw those crumbling bones
under my feet, and thought in what strong faith that
right arm had been lifted to heaven in the hour of extremity,
I felt that it was sacrilege to have opened his
tomb and disturbed his rest.

True, the Arabs would have reached him next year;
but I would rather it had been the Arabs than I. True,
he who promised can find the dust, though it be scattered
on the deserts of Africa. But I have a more than
Roman veneration for the repose of the dead; and,
though I felt no compunctions of conscience in scattering
the dust of the Arabs, who had themselves robbed
the tombs of their predecessors to make room for themselves,
yet I did not like the opening of that quiet place
in which a Christian of the early days was buried.

Who was he? Again imagination was on the wing.
He was one of those who had heard the voices of the
apostles; he was one of those who had seen the fierce
faith of the martyrs in their agony; he was one who had
himself suffered unto death for the love of his Lord and
Master. Or possibly that were too wild a fancy, for such
a man would hardly have a tomb like this. If so it were,
they must have buried him by night, with no torch, no
pomp, no light save the dim flickering light of this funereal
lamp guiding their footsteps down the corridors
of this—vast city of the dead; and this they left beside
him—sad emblem of his painful life—the light of faith,
pure though faint, in the darkness that was all around him.

Men were sublime in faith in those days. It was but
as yesterday, to them, that the footsteps of their Lord
were on the mountain of Ascension—it was but as yesterday

that the voice of Paul was heard across the sea.
Perhaps those dusty fingers had grasped the hand that
had often been taken lovingly in that hand which the
nail pierced. Perhaps—perhaps—I bowed my head reverently
as the thought flashed across me—for I do reverence
to the bones of the great dead, and though I would
not worship, yet I would enshrine in gold and diamonds
a relic of a saint—perhaps, in some far wandering from
his home, this man had entered Jerusalem, and stood
within the porch of the temple when He went by in all
the majesty of his lowliness.

You smile at the wild fancy. Why call it wild? Turn
but your head from before the doorway of the sepulchre,
and you see that column, at the foot of which Mark
taught the words of his Lord; and turn again to yonder
obelisk, and read that the king, who knew not Joseph,
but whom Moses and Aaron knew, carved it in honor of
his reign. Why, then, may not this tomb, which I have
opened, a hundred feet below the surface of the hill, contain
the dust of one who has traveled as far as the land
of Judea, only eighteen hundred years ago; who had
seen the visible presence of him whom prophets and
kings desired to see; and who, won by the kingly countenance,
the holy sweetness of that face, went homeward,
bearing with him enough of memory of that face and
voice to rejoice at the coming of “John, whose surname
was Mark,” and to listen to the teaching of the gospel
of the Messiah?

It startles those unused to Egyptian antiquities to hear
the far past spoken of as thus present with us. But the
facts are powerful and undeniable.

One grows terribly old in visiting Egypt.

It is a fact little thought of, scarcely known at all out
of scientific circles, that Colonel Howard Vyse, the eminent
Englishman whose excavations in the pyramids at

Ghizeh and Sakkarah have contributed to science nearly
all that we know concerning those stupendous remains,
found in the third pyramid at Ghizeh, the broken coffin
of its builder, and the remains of a mummy, bones and
flesh, and clothes, that we have every reason to believe
are those of Mycerinus.

Any Englishman strolling down Regent street of a
winter morning, may turn aside a few blocks and look in
a glass case, in the British Museum, on those bones and
sinews, and believe with reason that the world knew no
greater monarch, in the twenty-first century before Christ,
than he whose dust and bones lie there! By their side,
is the coffin board bearing his name, and we know from
Herodotus, that his period was long before the date of
any dynasty that we can connect with known history.

If, then, the bones of the almost immediate successor
of Cheops are in a museum in England, why may I not
imagine that some of these bones in Alexandria were
living even a few brief centuries ago?

The inhabitants of modern Alexandria are of all nations
and kinds. Many of the Europeans are wealthy, and live
in considerable style, driving handsome equipages, with
elegantly-dressed footmen running before and crying,
“Clear the way,” in the day-time, or at night carrying
huge torches made by burning light-wood in an iron
frame on the end of a pole, and technically known as
Meshalks. Much business is done here, and many men
are employed in various ways, earning the low wages of
the Egyptian fellaheen, which never exceed a piastre
and a half, or about eight cents per day. The large
standing army of Said Pasha, of which a considerable detachment
is always here, is necessarily attended by the
wives and children of the soldiers, who lounge about the
streets, especially in the sunny and dusty suburbs, in all
stages of nakedness.

It is difficult to say what constitutes poverty in Egypt.
We should say, were they in America, or in Europe, that
the large mass of inhabitants were in squalid, abject,
hopeless poverty. But on examination they seem fat,
and certainly far happier, than the lower classes of any
other nation I have seen, and this when (I speak literally
now) the poverty of the most degraded, begging outcast
in New York, would be positive wealth to them here.
One solitary ragged shirt is the sole property, the entire
furniture, estate, and expectancy, of ninety-nine out of a
hundred of the inhabitants of Egypt in the cities of Alexandria
and Cairo. A man and his wife, or his two or more
wives, will possess a shirt to each, and a straw mat, old,
worn, and muddy, and have no other possession on earth
except naked children without a rag of clothing.

Nakedness is no shame here. Children up to ten and
twelve years of age, go about the streets with either one
ragged, filthy cloth wound around them, or, as frequently,
entirely naked. Groups of ten or a dozen play in the sunshine
here and there, without a rag of covering from head
to foot. The older people are scarcely more clad. A
single long blue shirt suffices for a woman of any ordinary
class. It is open in front to the waist, and reaches below
the knees. A piece of the same cloth, by way of vail
around the head, is the substitute for the elegant head,
coverings of the wealthy classes. The upper part of the
body is, of course, entirely exposed, and no one seems to
think of covering the breast from sun, wind, or eyes.
The face is usually hidden by the cloth held in the hand,
while the entire body is exposed without the slightest
attention to decency. Not unfrequently, when the woman
has not the extra covering for her head, she will
seize and lift her solitary garment to hide her features,
thereby leaving her person uncovered, it being in her
view a shame only to exhibit her face.

The women of Egypt are by nature magnificently
formed, and the habit of carrying burdens on their heads
gives them an erect shape and high cast of the head which
continues to extreme old age. I never saw a bent old
woman. I remember seeing one woman carrying a small
piece of bread on her head from which she occasionally
bit a piece, replacing it immediately on its shelf, and Mr.
Williams of the Indian Hotel, in Cairo, told, me that he
had seen a hawk take a piece of meat from the head of a
servant as she was carrying it home, an incident that reminded
me forcibly of the story of Saad and Saadi in the
Arabian Nights, and the loss of the turban.

The men wear whatever they possess in the way of
cloth. Doubtless one garment lasts a lifetime, and is
ignorant of water oftener than once a year. Their costume
is various. Some wear the single shirt; others, a
mass of dirty cloth wound round the body, neck, and
head; others, a coarse blanket made of camel's-hair, which
they throw rather gracefully over their shoulders, leaving
a corner to come over the head. The costumes vary so
much that I think I counted over thirty entirely different
and distinct styles of dress, in the square, in Alexandria,
before my windows, at one time.

These remarks, of course, are understood as applying
to the middle and lower classes. The wealthy Orientals
wear gorgeous dresses. The men usually adopt the
Nizam dress, and the ladies revel in silks and jewels that
would craze a New York belle.

I obtained admission into one hareem, of which, and
the splendor of the dresses, as well as the beauty of a
Greek girl that I saw there, I shall speak when writing
of the Holy Land.

The railway was completed only to Kafr-el-Aish, on
the Nile, and thence we went to Cairo by steamboat.
Constructed by English engineers, and under the superintendence

of a Scotch gentleman, I think I am safe in
saying that there is no railway in America so complete,
well constructed, and safe as this of Egypt. It is the
private property of the viceroy, and with this fact in
view, and the additional fact that it is already nearly
complete to Suez, capitalists may judge how probable it
is that Said Pasha is sincere in forwarding the canal project,
which would cut off all freight-travel to either Cairo
or Alexandria. I am convinced that his opinions have
been misrepresented to induce capitalists to embark in
the scheme of the Suez ship-canal, and that the true interests
of the Egyptian government are most decidedly
against it.

It was somewhat strange, as may well be imagined, to
see a train of cars, surrounded by a hundred guards in
turban and tarbouches, starting out of a city of mud
houses, through groves of palms and bananas, winding
it way around the Pillar of Diocletian and off into the
dismal waste that separates Lake Mareotis from the sea.
The speed was at first but slow, even slower than the
usual starting rate with us at home; but on reaching the
open country we made some thirty miles an hour steadily
until we came to Kafr-el-Aish, which was then the terminus
of the road on the Rosetta branch of the Nile,
eighty miles below Cairo. Here we were transferred to
the steamer in waiting for us, the first and second class
passengers going on the steamer, and the third class taking
an ordinary river boat, which was to be towed three
hundred feet astern.

It was impossible to get up any enthusiasm about the
Nile. This was indeed one of the branches of the great
river, but only one of them, and it was hardly more the
Nile than was the Mahmoud Canal in Alexandria, whose
waters are the same. The stream was muddy, flowing
high between its banks, and sometimes overflowing them,

and it was out of the question to admire such a mass of
mud. The hot sun shone fiercely on it, and the banks,
uninteresting in all respects, seemed to be broiling out a
patient existence, while here and there a collection of
mud huts, bee-hive like, gave the sole evidence of the life
of man in the Delta.

As the sun went down, the deck of the boat began to
present a strange spectacle. One by one the Mussulmans
went out on the little guard behind the wheel-house and
performed their ablutions in the prescribed style, and
then ascended the wheel-houses, kitchens, state-room
decks, and every other elevated place, and went through
the postures and prayers. It was certainly curious to
see a row of ten or fifteen men on each side of the deck
bowing in the strange but graceful forms of the Mohammedan
worship. We lay and looked at them till the
evening had passed into night, and then wrapping our
shawls around us, slept on the deck till roused by the
passage of the barrage .

This, it is not necessary to explain, is the magnificent
stone bridge intended to operate as a dam, which Mohammed
Ali projected, and his successors have continued
to its present state, across the Nile, at the point of the
Delta where it separates into different mouths, the object
being to raise the water somewhat higher and increase
the annual inundation. The wild appearance of the stone
piers, between which we passed, lit by immense torches
of blazing wood, and swarming with half-naked Arabs,
whose swarthy countenances glared on us in the flickering
light like the faces of so many fiends, roused us from
slumber; but we relapsed instantly into deeper sleep,
which remained unbroken until we arrived at Boulak,
the port of the modern city, and thence we drove swiftly,
by the light of a torch in the hands of a swift runner, up
the long avenue and into the gate of the Ezbekieh, and

were at, last in the city of the Mamelukes, Cairo the Victorious,
Cairo the Magnificent, Cairo the Beautiful, and
the Blessed.

Shall I confess it? There were two trains of thought
struggling for precedence in my mind during the first
half hour after my arrival, nor did the one gain entire
ascendancy until I was in bed and nearly asleep, as the
day was breaking over the red hills. The one was full
of all the wonderful creations of the Arabian Nights.
The heroes and all the natural and supernatural personages
of those exquisite imaginations were around me in
troops the moment I was within the city of Salah-e'deen.
With these spectres angels strove. I could call it nothing
else. Sublime and solemn memories, that forever linger
in this spot, of all the mighty men of that ancient religion,
of which our own is but the new form, of patriarchs
and holy men of old, of prophets and priests in later
days, who came down with the scattered remnant of the
line of Abraham; and last of all, of the mother of our
Lord, and his own infant footsteps; all these came to
drive away the genii that were around me, and before I
slept the seal of Solomon was over them again.

After four weeks in Cairo I began to feel at home.
With a reasonable amount of curiosity and perseverance,
one may accomplish a good deal in the way of studying
geography in that time.

What I did, and how I did it, it would be difficult, nay,
impossible even, in many instances, to describe. There
were morning rides along interminable narrow lanes,
where I would often lift my stick, just three feet long,
and holding it horizontally show Miriam, whose donkey
kept close behind mine everywhere, that that was the
exact width of the passage, called here a street, while the
overlapping lattices of the opposite houses shut out the
sunshine from above us. There were afternoon sittings
in the bazaars, on the shop front of Suleiman Effendi or
old Khamil the silk and embroidery merchant. One day
I was in the unknown depths of the well of Yusef in the
citadel, and another I was discussing history with Sheikh
Hassan in the Mosk el Azhar, and almost every morning
I smoked a sheeshee with Dr. Abbott, and talked of
ancient Egypt.

The modern Orient and the ancient East were thus
daily before me, and picking up a little Arabic for common
uses from day to day, I had soon but little need of a
dragoman, except as a guide to spots I desired to visit.

Some months later than this I saw Damascus. I was
disappointed in my hopes of reaching Bagdad, but I have
little doubt of the universal truth of my remark, that
Cairo is the most oriental city of the East. I use the
word in a sense in which most persons will understand
me without explanation. Damascus was more European
in external appearance; Cairo is the heart of the Orient.

During our first week in Cairo we had tried various
donkeys, and at length selected four which were much
the best, and these remained in our service for, a month.

I commend Mohammed Olan to all travelers as a
donkey-boy, if he be not already grown out of that position:
for he seemed in a fair way to emerge into a dragoman's
servant, that being first step toward being dragoman.
Donkey-boys pick up a little English and French,
and thus become fit for servants to travelers.

Every morning, therefore, our donkeys stood before
the door of the Indian Hotel, under the large lebbek
trees, on the side of the Ezbekieh, and a general shout
of good, morning welcomed our first appearance. The
ladies' saddles were English. All visitors to Egypt will
do well to provide themselves with these at Malta. In
Egypt, they will find them scarce, poor, and high-priced.

We took a regular morning gallop up the Mouski,
which is the chief Frank street, and leads directly to the
Turkish bazaars. In the latter our faces were well
known.

If you visit them, O traveler, remember Suleiman
Effendi, for my sake. He is the oldest man, with the
longest and whitest beard, and he smokes the most delicious
Latakea of all the merchants in the bazaars within
the chains, which chains forbid the entrance of camels or
donkeys among the jewels and amber and rare silks and
broideries that there abound. Many summery noons I lost
in clouds of forgetfulness, seated in dreamy langour, with

Suleiman the Magnificent on his little shop front,
discoursing in words that were less frequent than the volleys
of smoke, subjects of profound interest: such as the
reason why the smoke went upward, and why the fire
seemed brighter in the shade than the sunshine, and
why the sunshine was pleasant, and why we liked what
was pleasant more than what was not pleasant, and many
other marvelous and inexplicable things, in regard to all
which we arrived at much the same conclusions, and
always with complete satisfaction.

Ah, my friend, you may not know the luxury of such
discussions—you who waste golden hours in idle words,
raising what you call theories, and disputing and annihilating
them, and sharpening and hurting one another's
intellects with useless and sounding words.

Not so we who have learned the mystery of things in
the cool shades of the Cairene bazaars, from whose lips,
blue smoke issues in place of theories; and is not the
smoke of equal value? For this was the style of our discussion:

“O Suleiman Effendi, wherefore is it that the sunshine
falls into the bazaar, and why does it not pause up
yonder above the, roof of the wakalla?”

And Suleiman heard me, but he was not the man to
bother himself about a matter which he could explain in
one word, and so he sent a cloud of blue smoke up into
the sunshine, and, after a pause of some minutes, uttered
the word,

“Inshallah.”

“But, O Effendi, wherefore is it that you Mohammedans
do not look into these things? One would suppose
you did not care how soon the old roof over the
bazaars up yonder fell and crushed you. Will it not fall?
—look at it?”

The old man poured out a long sunbeam of smoke, for

the window in the crazy roof let the rays fall just before
him, and again ejaculated a guttural “Inshallah.”

“O Suleiman the honorable, listen to me. I, Braheem
Effendi, owe you a thousand piastres for the amber
mouth-piece I bought of you yesterday. I am American,
and there is no law in Musr to make me pay you. I
shall go without paying you.”

“Inshallah.”

“I am going now.”

“Inshallah.”

I dismounted from the shop front, shuffled on my
red slippers, and, as I bade him good-morning, the old
man uttered for once a somewhat disturbed “Bismillah,”
as if he were astonished that I was in earnest; and then
as I vanished in the crowd beyond the chains, he relapsed
into his ancient kief and left it all to God.

There is something comfortable about all this to a man
who has lived in fast America, and who has always had a
lazy inclination to leave matters to take care of themselves.

Sometimes we rode hour after hour around the streets
of Cairo, looking at old lattices, quaintly and elaborately
carved, catching once in a while the vision of a beautiful
face through some small opening, and carrying away with
us the blessings of smiles fro dark eyes. Ah me, how
many smiles I have had from unknown beauties that I
shall never see again; and yet, if one meets a fair woman
in the street, or on the steamer, or even but sees her on
the other side of a Cairene lattice, and exchanges a smile
with her, it is a thing of beauty to be remembered forever;
for who knows that we shall not meet again somewhere.
I wonder if I shall ever meet again that black-eyed
girl that looked at me in the street just inside the
Bab el Nasr. She was riding on a high-saddled donkey,
between two slaves, following three other women, who

looked all alike, and all like her. For a woman of Cairo,
who belongs to a wealthy hareem, is, when abroad, but a
huge bundle of black silk, with a thick white vail, through
which two eyes flash like stars.

I was last of our party—she last of hers—and, as she
went by me, suddenly her white hand threw back the
vail, and all the lustre of her magnificent countenance
shone on me. It was like those visions that we have in
drams that remain forever impressed on the memory. I
can never forget that face—nor would I, if I could. She
was not so exquisitely beautiful as the Greek girl I afterward
saw in a hareem in Syria, of whom I shall have somewhat
to say there, but her calm white face, her regular
features moulded in the most perfect manner, her red
lips ripe, full, and overflowing with fun, and, above all, her
eyes of deep, splendid beauty were enough to remember
for a day or a lifetime.

In one of our rambles about town, going up one street
and down another, without heeding whither they led us,
we found ourselves one day at the great entrance of the
mosk of the Sultan Hassan, and dismounted to enter
it. Outside the door were venders of trifles of various
sorts; a kind of old junk dealers, second-hand clothiers,
and sellers of paste and imitation jewelry. Among
them were venders of Meccan curiosities—sandal-wood
beads, and the wood, dipped in the holy well of Hagar,
which they use to clean their teeth with. All, or nearly
all, the Moslems have good teeth, kept white with this
wood, a small stick of which, chewed at one end, forms a
soft brush, which they use till the whole is worn away.

The mosk is a grand structure, chiefly interesting from
being built of the stone which was the casing of the
great Pyramid of Ghizeh. It is the most imposing structure
in all the Mohammedan countries I have visited, and
probably the most so in the Moslem world. The lofty

walls surround a rectangular court, one side of which
opens by a grand arch into an immense alcove, in the
rear of which is the inclosed chamber around the tomb of
the Sultan Hassan, who was murdered and buried here.
The guide shows the traveler the blood stains on the
pavement here, and says something unintelligible about
its being the blood of Mamelukes murdered by the sultan;
but I am inclined to think the fact is that the Mameluke
blood is of the times of Mohammed Ali.

On the tomb lie, as is the custom, a copy of the Koran
in a strong box, and sundry old coverings of silk, that
were once heavy and gorgeous. The days are past
when any one lived to cover the Sultan Hassan with
cashmere.

Immediately above the mosk, on the end of a projecting
spur of the Mokattam hills, stands the citadel of
Cairo, a small city in itself. The vast extent of the walls
must inclose ten or fifteen acres of ground, in which are
mosks, palaces, and government-houses.

High over all towers the white mosk of Mohammed
Ali, built of unpolished alabaster, from the quarries at
Tel el Amarna. Within the gorgeous building, which
can not be even approached except by first putting off
the shoes, the old viceroy lies quiet in a corner untroubled
by visions of Mamelukes. He sleeps on the very spot
that he once flooded with red blood, when he annihilated
that race which had so long ruled Egypt.

Standing by his tomb, I heard a story of his later years
that I have not seen printed. Whosoever has read that
story of the slaughter of the Mamelukes by Mohammed
Ali, has observed, that in whatever volume it occurs, it
invariably closes with the friendship that the viceroy
always afterward had for Suleiman Aga, who escaped
the massacre in the dress of an old woman. The viceroy
professed to doubt the method of his escape. Suleiman

tried the disguise on his master again, and successfully
begged from him in the same costume.

The alleged affection of the viceroy was not uniform,
however. He hated a Mameluke, and not even Suleiman
escaped his hatred.

One morning as they sat cozily together as of old, Suleiman
saw something that disturbed his quiet of soul,
either in the face of his master. or in the cup before him.

“Why don't you drink your coffee?” said the old
viceroy.

“Do you wish me to drink it?”

“Certainly. Drink it, man—drink.”

The Mameluke tucked back the voluminous folds of his
dress, and exhibited to the viceroy the gold handles of a
half dozen pistols, on one of which he laid his finger,
while his eye sparkled silently all that he would have
said.

“‘It is well to die in good company,’ saith the tradition;
shall I drink?”

There was no one near to seize him. It was literally a
case of life and death. The wily monarch saw that he
was caught.

“Tush! nonsense, Suleiman! don't make a fool of
yourself. If you don't like your coffee, here, I'll pour it
behind the cushion;” and he did so. Then they sent for
the Koran, and laid it down between them, and swore
good faith each to the other across it. After that Suleiman
lived to see his master buried in his great mosk
standing on the spot once red with the blood of his
slaughtered friends.

Another day's ride brought us to the southernmost
gate of the city; and thence we pushed on to the tombs
of the family of Mohammed Ali, which are not far southwest
of Cairo, in the sandy plain between it and old
Cairo or Fostat. Here the great viceroy built a mosk

for a burial-place, and before he died saw many of his
valiant children laid there; but himself sleeps elsewhere,
in the great mosk within the citadel.

Here Abbas and Toossoon, and the great Ibrahim are
buried. The tomb of the latter is a most superb sepulchral
monument; and probably, with the solitary exception
of that of Napoleon, it is the most splendid in the
world. It is a monumental structure of marble, over
which a rich mazarine blue enamel is laid, covering the
entire monument. This is broken by the various inscriptions,
which are in relief, sharply cut from the marble, in
all the styles of character known to the Arabic, and all
gilded. The effect is rich and dazzling.

Here and there, in the mosk, men were praying and
reading aloud from the Koran, but none seemed disturbed
by our entrance. It was with no common emotion that
I found myself standing by the tomb of the man whom
history will consider as the rival of Napoleon among the
great warriors of the past seventy years. From it I
walked a little distance across the hot sand to the grave
of Murad Bey, the rival of Le Beau Sabreur himself. His
tomb is in a sort of inclosed grave-yard, in the dry sand,
covered with a rude stone structure that will not outlast
this century. If a voice could be found that had power
to open these graves and show these dead, as they lie
with their hands under their cheeks, and their faces
toward the Prophet's tomb, what a scene would the dead
of Egypt present! What mighty califs of the old lines,
what fierce soldiers of later days, with closed lips, and
sightless eyes, and shrunken features—all with their thin
faces toward Mecca!

Every one has read of the beautiful and airy structures
east of Cairo, known as the tombs of the Mameluke sultans.
Some on has spoken of them as exhalations from
the sand. They are in sadly ruinous condition now,

chiefly surrounded by mud huts, and their doorways
thronged by begging fellaheen and naked children. They
were our favorite resorts in the afternoons, when we had
nowhere else to ride to, and thither, going out of the
Bab el Nasr, the gate of victory, we would ride slowly
and watch the changing lights on their graceful minarets
as the sun went down behind the pyramids.

Such, from day to day, was our employment in Cairo.

Think of looking up your banker at the bottom of a
street four feet wide and four hundred long, or of buying
a coat over a chibouk and a cup of coffee!

The bazaars of Cairo have been frequently described.
The streets are a little wider where the shops abound,
and are usually roofed over, admitting sunshine by windows
in the matting or close roof, only at mid-day. Business
hours are from about eleven to three. No shop is
open longer in the principal bazaars. I have more than
once found a merchant closing his shop and have been
refused an article I wished to purchase.

“Come to-morrow. I am going home now.”

“But I shall not be here to-morrow.”

“Inshallah!” and he looked up and departed.

At mid-day the bazaars are crowded, jammed, with
passers-by or purchasers, women with vailed faces, and
donkeys loaded with water-skins, Turks, Bedouins, camels,
dromedaries, and horses, all mingled together, for sidewalk
or pavement there is none, and it is therefore at the
risk of constant pressure against the filthiest specimens
of humanity, and constant collisions with nests of fleas
and lice, that one passes through the narrow streets.

I remember well the purchase of a common traveling
dress which Miriam effected, and which will serve to
illustrate the Cairene and Eastern style of business. We
went to the silk-merchants in the wealthiest bazaar of
Cairo. One and another showed his small stock of goods,

but it was with difficulty that Miriam hit on such as
suited her. When this was found, commenced the business
of determining the price. The shop of the Turkish
merchant is but a small cupboard. The front is invariably
about the size of an ordinary shop window in America,
say six feet wide by eight high. The floor of the
shop is elevated two feet above the street, and on a carpet
in the middle of the floor sits the merchant. His
shop is so small that every shelf is within reach of his
hands. Of these shops there are thousands in Cairo, and
whatever the business, the shop is of the same description.

Miriam sat on the right hand of the merchant, with her
feet in the street over the front of the shop; I on his left.
The silk goods lay piled on the carpet between us, the
pieces she had selected being uppermost. The first step
toward price was a cup of coffee and a pipe. She took
coffee; I smoked quietly a few minutes, and the Turk
smoked as calmly and coolly as if there was no silk on
earth, and he was dreaming of heaven. For some minutes
the silence was unbroken, while he looked at the opposite
side of the street, and we blew a tremendous cloud
of smoke. At length I broke the silence.

“How much?”

He smoked calmly awhile, sent the cloud slowly up,
and the words came from his lips as gently as the smoke
itself.

“Three hundred and seventy-five piastres.”

“I will give you one hundred and fifty.”

“It cost me more money than twice that.”

“It is not worth any more.”

“It is very beautiful. I sold one like it yesterday for
three hundred and eighty.”

“I will not give it.”

Five minutes of smoke and silence. Miriam most decidedly

impatient, and yet full of fun at this novel mode
of buying a dress. A fresh pipe and a fresh start. I
asked him the least he would take. It was three hundred.
I laid down the pipe, sighed heavily, and walked
away down the bazaar toward the donkey-boys. He followed
us out and down the street, calmly and quietly assuring
us that he was honorable in his statements, and
offering a reduction of ten piastres more. I offered him
two hundred. He exclaimed in despair and retired.

Having, made one or two other purchases, we returned
to the charge. He had spread his praying carpet, and
was kneeling in his shop engaged in his devotions. A
dozen other Mussulmans were in sight, doing as he. It
was the hour when the voice of the muezzin called to
prayer, and though in the din and bustle of the crowded
bazaar I had not, heard it, yet on the ears of these sincere
worshipers it had fallen from the minaret of Kalaoon, and
they obeyed the summons.

We waited till he had finished, and then resumed our
seats and negotiations, which were finally terminated by
our coming together on an intermediate point, and the
sale being closed, we mounted our donkeys and rode
homeward. This was but the first of a dozen similar
negotiations, and is a fair specimen of the Cairene manner
of doing business.

But let no one therefore imagine that my friend Suleiman
Effendi is not as respectable a merchant as any man
on 'change in Gotham, or because he smokes a pipe and
not a cigar think him either low in his tastes or susceptible
of ignoble influences. Suleiman is a merchant-prince,
and his Latakea is of irreproachable fragrance.

We had not yet decided on a dragoman for the Nile.
Abrams, our Maltese servant, had accepted an offer from
some gentlemen, and was preparing to go up the river
with them. Meantime we had for a daily attendant and
guide a stately-looking Arab, Hajji Ismael, by name,
whose chief virtue consisted in his splendid outfit. Every
morning he made his appearance in a new suit from head
to foot, now flashing in silk and now dignified in broadcloth.
The fellow must have worn some hundred pounds'
worth of clothing, but failing thereby to impress us with
a sense of his desirableness as a permanent dragoman, he
gave up in despair, having at last been reduced to appear
twice in the same shoes, although in all other respects
his change was as complete as usual.

Marshalled by Hajji Ismael, Hajji (pilgrim) by virtue
of having visited the Prophet's tomb at Medina and the
holy Kaaba at Mecca, we penetrated all manner of places
and saw all manner of sights.

Cairo in itself possesses no interest by reason of any
great antiquity. It does not stand on ground that is hallowed
by any ancient name, story, or ruins. The founding
of Cairo, known formerly as Musr-el-Kahira, was in
the year 969, but the city received its greatest embellishments,
and became most powerful and wealthy, under the

reign of Yusef Salah-e'deen, known to all readers of the
history of the crusades.

Ancient Memphis stood on the west side of the Nile,
and some four to eight miles higher up than Boulak.
Cairo stands on the desert edge, its eastern gates opening
on the sand, and its western on the rich fields of sugarcane
and groves of palms and acacia, which, in a belt two
miles wide, separate the city from the river. On the river
edge, stretching a mile and a half north and south, is
Boulak, from which two broad avenues run up to the
city. At the southern part of Boulak commences a row
of palaces on the bank of the river, which is here divided
on two sides of the island of Rhoda, and these continue in
unbroken succession two miles southward, to the head of
Rhoda, where, on the mainland, is Old Cairo , or Fostat.
This occupies the site of the Roman station Babylon, and
in its neighborhood are certain ancient Christian churches,
of which I shall speak hereafter. Prior to Roman times
the cities in this part of Egypt were Memphis, on the
west bank, and Heliopolis, on the east, the latter lying six
miles north of the site of Cairo, on the desert edge.

Once for all, let me say to those few who do not already
know it, that Egypt south of the Delta (which
commences about twenty miles north of Cairo) is on an
average four miles wide. The hills on the two sides of
the river are about that distance apart, sometimes approaching
on one side to the very river's edge, and sometimes
on the other. Between the bases of these hills the
land is for the most part a dead water level, annually
covered by the rising Nile. The villages are usually
built at the foot of the mountains. Where otherwise,
they are on artificial mounds in the plain, or on the ruins
of ancient temples. These hills are rocky cliffs, utterly
destitute of vegetation. Yellow sand pours down over
them from the Arabian and the Libyan deserts, and sometimes

encroaches on the cultivated land. The hills on
the eastern side of the Nile, after following the course
of the river as far as to Cairo, send a single low spur into
the city, on the point of which is the citadel, and then
sweep off to the eastward and disappear. From Cairo
eastward, the desert reaches in general on a level to
Suez, and north of this Egypt grows broader, the Nile
separating into many streams, and rain not being so unfrequent.

The Nile being now high, for it was yet early in October,
the country was still overflowed, and it was impossible
to arrange for a visit to the pyramids without taking
tents and remaining there over night. The ladies
were not yet accustomed to hardship, and we were unwilling
to break into nomadic life thus suddenly.

Heliopolis was almost as difficult of access, except by a
route along the desert edge, which was some miles longer
than the direct route by Matareeyeh. Nevertheless, we
tried it one pleasant morning with success.

Hajji Ismael was out in a new dress. It was his
eighth morning, I think, and his eighth dress. The
donkey-boys were rejoicing in the prospect of a good
day, for a long expedition always made necessary a luncheon,
which they were very certain of sharing. I
can not too highly commend Mr. Williams's Indian Hotel
to travelers; though small, it is by far the best and most
comfortable in Egypt, and the stranger will find himself
there most perfectly at home. They always provided us
with a capital luncheon when we went away for a day's
ride, and so to-day.

We rattled along the Ezbekieh and through innumerable
narrow streets, and at last ont of a gate on the
north side of the city, and across the country toward the
ancient city on On.

Our route lay just within the edge of cultivated land;

we should have done better to keep out on the sand of
the desert, for we found ourselves at length in a field
from which there was no dry outlet but on the back
track. The appearance of the water was not very deep,
and we ventured in. But we had not calculated for the
mud underneath. Nearly a fourth of a mile we advanced
through the water, and then the mud deepened. Miriam's
donkey slipped, and but for the boys who caught
her, she would have been worse than drowned. They
carried her on their shoulders across the rest of the flood,
and we then continued our way, through all kinds of
paths, wet and dry, mud and sand, sunny and shady, till
we arrived at Matareeyeh and the fig-tree of Joseph and
Mary.

The tradition that the Saviour rested under this tree is
very ancient, but of how early a date it is impossible to
say. The Copts and Armenians, I believe, both adopt it.
It stands in a fenced garden, and the well of water near
it is said to be a fountain that burst out to satisfy the
Virgin's thirst.

Passing this, we saw at some distance from us, rising
over the dense mass of trees and shrubs that surrounded
it, the solitary obelisk of Heliopolis. Just before reaching
it we passed three great pieces of stone, evidently
parts of a gateway, on which we found the cartouche of
Thothmes III. the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

It was the first of the great antiquities of Egypt that I
had seen, and I paused here with perhaps somewhat more
of respect than I should give those stones now after five
months among the mighty ruins of this oldest countries.
But there is nevertheless a something about those
stones which give them an interest that scarcely any others have.

If, as we believe, Thothmes III. was the Pharaoh of the
days of Moses, then this may well have been part of the

gateway to his palace temple through which the great
lawgiver passed and repassed, in the days of the captivity
and deliverance of the children of Jacob. It was no idle
fancy, strangely as it may strike the ear of one unaccustomed
to the antiquity of Egypt. A few paces more
brought us to the obelisk, the solitary memorial of the
grandeur of the great city of the times of Joseph.

This monument bears the name of Osirtasen, and the
date of this monarchs probably not far from the time of
Abraham. As I shall elsewhere speak of the chronology
of Egypt, I shall not pause here to speak of the chronological
differences among Egyptian scholars. For our
present purposes it is enough to believe that this magnificent
column stood here when Jacob blessed his children
and departed, and when Joseph charged them to carry
his bones into the Land of Promise. Around it then
gathered the most splendid palaces of Egypt; and here,
perhaps, was held the court to which the old wanderer of
Canaan came. But of that old glory nothing remains.
The obelisk stands ten feet below the surface of the surrounding
earth, in an excavation made to exhibit its base,
and under the mounds that lie here and there about it
are the buried ruins of the City of the Sun. We sat in
the shadow of the obelisk and spread before us our lunch.
It was of bread, figs, dates, pomegranates, and oranges,
and each of these fruits was growing, in profusion within
twenty yards of us, as well as olives, custard apples, bamia,
and melons of every kind. The obelisk stands in the
centre of a garden of perhaps twenty acres of good land,
and around this the desert rolls barren and hot. It would
seem that the peculiar interest attached to this spot as
the City of Joseph, as well as the chief seat of learning
in later years, where Plato and the other great philosophers
studied and taught, has been specially provided for
in the luxuriance of the fruits and products of its soil; so

that, instead of the shining sand that covers Memphis
and lies around the pyramids, we have the grove of the
Academy to rest in while we listen to the voice of its
great teacher.

In the neighborhood of Heliopolis I had opportunity
to see the method of cultivation adopted by the modern
Egyptians.

No land is under cultivation which is not reached by
the Nile overflow, or by simple machines for raising water
and pouring it on the soil. Rain being no dependence,
irrigation is continued throughout the growing season.
So soon as the Nile retires the surface of the ground
bakes hard. This is broken up by the rude plow of ancient
and modern times, unchanged since the days of
Sesostris, and the soil then planted and steadily watered
till the fruit is ripe.

Canals, large and small, intersect the country everywhere.
Let it be remembered that the arable land of
Egypt is almost a perfect level, so that when the Nile
rises to a certain height it flows over all the land in every
direction, and canals continue the supply as the river falls.
Some lands, rescued from the desert, are on a level a few
feet higher, and others are not so low as to be covered
by the Nile in a year like this, when it does not reach its
full height. Every field, high or low, is intersected by
little canals, made by heaping the dirt up and hollowing
a trench in it, so that the field is divided, like a chessboard,
into a number of small squares. These trenches
are supplied with water by two processes. The larger
trenches, which run several miles, are supplied by wheels
at the Nile or in the canals, which are turned by cattle,
and which raise an endless chain of earthen pots of water.
A pump is unknown in Egypt. The smaller canals are
supplied by a shadoof, which is arranged precisely like
an old-fashioned well-pole in America, except that the

swing is so short that the man holds the bucket almost
constantly in his hand, and dips and empties, dips and
empties, all day long. Up the river the shadoof is used
on the side of the Nile instead of the water-wheel; and
everywhere for the purpose of lifting water from one
trench to another that will water a few acres of land that
is higher in grade.

A very simple contrivance for the same purpose is often
found in the fields. It is a basket, made of palm-leaves
or some other stout substance, swung on four ropes, two
in the hands of one man and two of another. The men
sit on opposite sides of the stream or pool of water supplied
from a canal or trench, and drop the basket into the
water. Then they raise it rapidly, swinging it at the
same time over the top of the higher trench into which
they wish to lift the water, and at the same instant slacken
two of the ropes so as to allow the water to fall
out. The rapidity and ease with which they continue
this labor from morning till night is no less a source of
surprise than the quantity of water they raise, keeping a
steady stream running from their place of work

Oftentimes a piece of land is rescued from the desert
and made into a beautiful garden. Almost as often the
desert covers over a garden and reclaims it for part of
its empire of desolation. Thus at Heliopolis it would appear
that the basin, which may be formed by the ruined
wall of an ancient temple, over which the sand has heaped
itself up, suggested to some one the idea of bringing the
Nile into it and watering the sand. With the Nile came
alluvial deposit, and with the deposit fruitfulness—such
fruitfulness as we seldom see even on our western prairies.
In this small farm, around the old stone, grows
every variety of eastern fruit. Oranges swing in clusters
against its very sides, and pomegranates, and figs, and
olives, are all found in the grounds, while vines and vegetables

abound. A mud village stands on the edge of the
desert, two or three hundred yards from the obelisk, and
is the modern successor of the great On. Alas! for the
difference. A crowd of women and children followed us
through the narrow winding street, shouting for money,
until we were fairly out of their district, and they regarded
us as within the “right of begging” of the next
village.

On the way home, I found good shooting along the
edge of the desert. I had my gun with me, and having
missed a shot at a flock of ibis, I loaded my barrels more
carefully, and had afterward better success. It is a curious
fact, that the air of Egypt is so very light and clear
that the same quantity of gunpowder carries shot and
ball much further than elsewhere, and the load of a gun
is to be reduced nearly one-third for correct shooting.
This I found instantly by the peculiar ring of the barrels
on firing, and I learned afterward that such is the case in
Egypt.

Desert partridges, so called, abound in this neighborhood.
They have but one characteristic which should
entitle them to be called partridges. That is the feathered
legs. In other respects they are more like a large
pigeon in shape, and their color is of a nondescript,
desert-sand sort of a color, not marked regularly in any
specimens that I have seen. I had two or three shots at
them, and had some half dozen to bring home for dinner.
Add to these a large hawk, and an eagle, as the boys
called it, but in fact a vulture, measuring about four feet
from tip to tip, and you have the contents of my game-bag,
which, by-the-by, was the loose bosom of the shirt
of one of the boys, which was our constant receptacle for
articles to be carried.

Returning homeward, we diverged somewhat from the
direct path, and crossed the hills to look again at the

tombs of the Mameluke sultans. Sadly ruinous, and as
sadly beautiful, they seemed in the sunset light like representatives
of the religion of Mohammed, sprung gloriously
from the desert, and fast falling again into the
wastes of sand. The most beautiful of these, that of the
sultan, Ghait Bey, who died in 1496, is worthy of preservation,
as the most exquisite specimen of eastern architecture
which the East can produce. Within the
mosk which is attached to the tomb, and under the
dome, stands a block of black stone, bearing the impress
of a human foot, said to be the foot of the Prophet.
Another stone in the same mosk bears the perfect impression
of two feet, also attributed to the same great
origin, but I think the, two footprints rather stagger the
faith of the Mussulmans. They were very earnest in
pressing their kisses on the single footprint, but they
only glanced at the other stone, although its casing of
silver was as rich, and its impressions were quite as deep.

We entered the city by the Bab el Nasr, the gate of
victory.

I have met all sorts of derweeshes (I am particular in
spelling this word as it is pronounced) in the East, and
have been alternately blessed and cursed by an infinite
number. There was one fellow in Cairo who cursed me
regularly. If there is any virtue in his anathemas my
case is hopeless. I met him daily, he was daily impertinent
in his demands, thrust his wooden plate, smelling
vilely, under my nose, utterly heedless of my refined sensibility
of nerve in that region, and stopped my donkey
with new impudence every successive day. As soon
as I picked up enough Arabic for the purpose I cursed
him back, and, after that, almost any pleasant day, you
might have seen a funny group at the corner of the
Mouski, by the police office. He cursed by Mohammed,
and I by St. Simeon Stylites; he invoked Allah, and I
hurled at him the anger of Juggernaut. He never
dreamed of half the gods and prophets that I showered
on his unlucky head, and, at last, I converted him. That
is to say he ceased cursing and began to question, and
then I had him.

We sat down together on a mat, under the shade of
one of the great lebbek trees, on the east side of the
Ezbekieh (which, be it known, is a vast open square,
once a lake, now filled up, and luxuriant with all manner

of trees and herbs). A curious crowd gathered around
us, while I informed him of some of the deities I had invoked,
their history and powers, and thereby endeavored
to enlighten him in the general subject of natural religion
as a groundwork to true revelation.

I think I got more out of him than he from me, for I
learned somewhat about derweeshes.

A derweesh is a man who has vowed to lead a religious
life. This may be esteemed a general definition.
There are many classes of them. A sort of freemasonry
exists among each of these, but no man because a derweesh
is therefore obliged to renounce his business. I
know of nothing to prevent the sultan himself becoming
one, and retaining his throne. Many classes of them profess
to perform miracles, thrusting swords through their
bodies pins through their cheeks, spikes into their eyes,
and all this without leaving wounds. The most squalid
wretches in the streets of an eastern city are derweeshes,
naked, with the exception of a piece of sheepskin around
the loins, who go about begging, or lie in stupid inanity
in the crowded markets.

My new acquaintance invited me to visit the college
to which he belonged, but this was out of my power
then. We parted pleasantly, and after that, he looked
calmly at me, as a man whose prodigious learning he was
bound to respect, and I paid him liberally for his silent
flattery.

As we separated, I observed a Punch and Judy tent
near by, and, paying five paras (one cent), went in. The
scene was undeniably the most ludicrous I ever saw at a
theatrical performance, Neapolitan or of a higher grade.
Twenty Egyptians, old and young, sat on the ground,
with large open eyes fixed on the puppets. Punch beat
Judy, and shouted bad Arabic, and Judy screamed in
the most horrible of dialects. But it was all Hebrew to

these poor devils. They enjoyed it. It was a sort of
miracle of wonderment; but as to fun—that never entered
their heads: and when it was over, they retired as
solemnly as if they had heard preaching in a mosk.

Voluntary religious meetings, gotten up by the derweeshes,
are of hourly occurrence in the streets and
coffee shops. A few of them will erect a pole, with
flaunting silk flags on it, and begin to surround it with a
monotonous dance or motion of the body. Volunteers
enter, and join the increasing circle, until it not infrequently
numbers from fifty to a hundred persons.

As we were returning one afternoon from the citadel,
and entered the Ezbekieh square, near the Oriental Hotel,
I caught sight of one of these assemblies surrounding a
pole, and commencing their devotional service of dancing
and singing. We paused to see them, and sat on our
donkeys outside of the ring, in which some fifty men,
dressed in various costumes, were swinging their heads
and bodies from side to side, and giving utterance, at
each jerk, to a hoarse guttural exclamation. This
movement became very rapid. Not infrequently one of
them would cry out “Allah!” in a voice of thunder.
They then formed two rings, those in the inner facing
those in the outer, and swinging toward each other, they
shouted the same strange sound at each swing. Their
faces became convulsed; they foamed at the mouth, they
screamed, tossed their hair, embraced each other, and
called on God with the same hoarse cry.

We were deeply impressed with the scene. We had
gone as closely up to the outside of the ring as we could
ride, and the crowd of spectators had made way for us,
so that we were directly behind the outer ring, and our
donkeys' heads were close to the performers, when suddenly
—imagine our horror!—Miriam's donkey, being
evidently taken with the scene and affected by it, elevated

his head and nose between the heads of two of the
derweeshes—one an old man with flowing gray hair and
beard, the other a young man with long dark locks—and
gave utterance to such a cry as none but an Egyptian
donkey can imitate. It was like the blast of a hundred
cracked trumpets or fish-horns. Never were men so
frightened as were the two derweeshes. They nearly fell
into the ring with terror, Mohammed, the boy, in an
agony of despair, sprang to his donkey's head and seized
his jaws with both hands. Vain endeavor! He but interrupted
the terrific sound, and made it tenfold worse
as it escaped from second to second, and at length he
gave it up and fell to the ground. It was too much for
Mussulman gravity. They looked at us furiously at first,
but the next instant a universal scream of laughter broke
from the surrounding crowd, and we rode off in the midst
of it. Even Mohammed Olan, superstitious Arab that he
was (for he told me that very day that he had seen an
Efrite the night before) enjoyed the fun of the things, and
muttered to his mistress as he ran by her side, “He good
Mussulman donkey.”

Our Friday is the Moslem seventh day of rest, or of
special devotion. We selected one Friday to visit the
chief college of the derweeshes on the Nile where we
could see the whirling, and hear the howling. Leaving
the hotel at an early hour in the morning, provided with
luncheon in case of necessity, we went first to Old Cairo ,
and visited the Mosk of Amer, which is the most
ancient of the buildings of the modern Egyptians. It
was erected about A.D. 860, and there is a tradition connected
with it, and firmly relied on the Moslems,
that when it falls the crescent will wane. If it be true,
the fall of the Moslems can not be far distant. Already
the great walls have fallen in, and lie in crumbling
heaps within the sacred inclosure; and splendid columns

and gorgeous capitals are here and there in the sand and
dust, miserable emblems of the fading glory of the power
that has so long controlled the East. Near the entrance
are two marble columns of somewhat amusing history.
They stand close together on the same pedestal; and, in
former times, when the mosk was in its glory, these
two pillars were the shibboleth of the faith. If a man
could pass between them he might hope to pass the gates
of Paradise. If he were too great in body—if the good
things of the world had so increased his rotundity that
he might not squeeze his mortal parts through the narrow
passage—then it was very certain that his immortal soul
could never hope to see the houries. Alas! for the decay
of the mosk and the trembling of the old faith. There
was no one of us that could not readily pass between the
pillars, though they stand firmly as ever, and do not seem
worn by the myriads who have tried themselves here. I
did stick at first. I confess that the flesh-pots of Egypt
have added to my usually respectable size so much that
my vest buttons caught on the inner post, and for a
moment I thought my anti-Mohammedanism settled.
But doubtless these later years of Frank innovations have
tended to relax the strictness of the faith, for I went
through without difficulty after one vigorous attempt,
and the others followed me.

The service, if I may so call it—the Zikr—at the derweesh
mosk was to commence at one o'clock. We had
an hour before us, and so we took a boat at the ferry
from Old Cairo to Ghizeh, and went over to the island of
Rhoda to see the Nilometer.

It is on the upper end of the island, adjoining the
palace of Hassan Pacha, and consists of a graduated stone
pillar in the centre of an open well. Its age has been a
subject of much discussion; but no one, I believe, thinks
of placing it before Mohammedan times.

We saw but little of it, for the Nile was up to within
three inches of the top. But here, on the upper end of
Rhoda, for the first time, we saw the Nile, the great
river, and our enthusiasm was now at the fullest. We
stood on the marble portico of the palace facing up the
stream, which is divided here, and saw the lordly river
come down in all its majesty, and roll its waves to either
side of us, and away to the great sea. Here it was the
Nile. No dream, no half river, no small stream of dashing
water, but that great river of which we had read,
thought, and dreamed; the river on which princes in
long-forgotten years had floated palaces and temples from
far up, down to their present abode; the river which
Abraham saw , and over which Moses stretched out his
arm in vengeance; where the golden barge of Cleopatra
swept with perfumed breezes, and when, but a few years
later, she was dead and her magnificence gone, the feeble
footsteps of the Son of God, in infancy on earth, hallowed
the banks that the idolatry of thousands of years had
cursed; the river of which Homer sang, and Isaiah prophesied,
and in whose dark waters fell the tears of the
weeping Jeremiah; the river of which all poets wrote,
all philosophers taught, all learning, all science, all art
spoke for centuries. The waters at our feet, murmuring,
dashing, brawling against the foundation of the palace,
come by the stately front of Abou Simbal, had loitered
before the ruins of Phiæ, had dashed over the cataracts
and danced in the starlight by Luxor and Karnak. From
what remote glens of Africa, from what Ethiopian plains
they rose, we did not now pause to think, but having
looked long and earnestly up the broad reach of the
river, we turned into the palace, and after pipes and
coffee, the universal gift of hospitality here, we returned
to our boat.

We drifted slowly down the river by the spot where

tradition says that Moses was hid in the rushes, to the
village of the derweeshes, that stands on the bank, among
the palaces that stretch from Boulak to Old Cairo .

They received us with the utmost politeness. There
was no bigoted hatred of Christians visible. On the contrary,
they gave us seats in the cool court-yard, under
the trees, and brought us coffee, and talked as pleasantly
as heart could desire. Fifty wild looking men stood
around us, gazing indeed somewhat curiously at our
costume, but not in the least offended at our visit; and
when the hour for commencing worship arrived, they
brought us coffee again, and then conducted us into their
mosk, where we took our seats on the matting at the
western side. About eighty men stood in a semicircle,
with their faces to the south-east, the centre of the circle
being the arched niche which is always left in a mosk
on the side toward Mecca, by way of guiding the prayers
of the faithful in that direction. Musical instruments
hung on the wall, and some of the worshipers used them,
taking down one and putting up another from time to
time. The service consisted in swinging backward and
forward in time with the leader, a noble-looking man,
who walked around the inner side of the circle, and uttering
at each swing a violent groan, or rather a deep,
strong sob. For half an hour this motion was steady;
then it became more rapid. They swung the body forward,
leaning down until their hair swept the floor in
front, and threw themselves backward with a sudden,
swift bend until it again touched the floor behind them.
The velocity of this motion may be guessed at from the
fact, that for the space of more than an hour the hair
never rested or fell on the head, but continually described
a larger circle than the head in this motion.

In the mean time a man dressed in a long white hooped
dress, tight at the waist, and some twenty feet in circumference

at the bottom of the skirt, slid into the centre of
the half circle, and commenced a slow revolution, apparently
as gentle and easy as if he stood on a wheel turned
by machinery. After a minute, during which he swung
out his skirts and started fairly, his speed increased. His
hands were at first on his breast, then one on each side
of his head; and when the full speed was attained, they
were stretched out horizontally, the right hand on his
right side, with the palm turned up, and the left hand on
its side, with the palm down. For twenty-four minutes,
without pause, rest, or change of speed, he continued to
whirl around like a top. The velocity was exactly fifty-five
revolutions to the minute. I timed it frequently, and
was astonished at the regularity. This was not a long
performance. It is oftentimes an hour, and even two or
three hours, in duration. After this man retired, another
took his place, and all the time the excitement in the
outer circle was increasing. Some shouted, some howled
out the name of God. “Allah! Allah!” rang in the dome
of the mosk from eighty voices; and now all the musical
instruments, including a dozen large and small drums, added to the terrible noise.

Suddenly the noble-looking man, the leader of the
revel, turned and faced the city of the prophet, and instantly
all was silent. Some fell on the pavement in convulsions,
others stood trembling from head to foot, evidently
past all self control, while others pounded their
heads in the stones and gnashed their teeth. Those who
were in fits—for it was nothing else—of epilepsy, were
taken care of by attendants, who also advanced to those
who were still standing, and, placing their arms around
them, bent them gently down to their knees, and left
them so. It was a scene not a little touching, after, the
terrible confusion, to see those silent frames bowed down

before their God in the dim mosk. We came away and
left them there.

All this seems to the reader a story of incredible fanaticism.
We think so of such stories when the scene is laid
in remote countries; but I can not forbear remarking,
that the whole scene was startlingly like to many, very
many, that I have seen in America, in religious assemblies,
even to the minutest particulars. The excitement,
the throwing of the head backward and forward, foaming
at the mouth; the loud shouts—“O Lord!” “God!”
“God help us!” and the like; the faintings; the epilepsy;
every thing was familiar to us, and will be so to
many who read this. It is certainly a remarkable fact,
and it is a fact, that in a zikr of the howling derweeshes
of Cairo I saw a scene more like familiar scenes in American
than any other that I saw in Egypt.

I can not close this chapter without contrasting this
with another worship that we joined in frequently in the
city of Salah-e' deen.

The American mission, by what societies sustained I do
not know, is doing its work silently, but successfully, in
the city. In the cholera season, when all others, including
the English missionary, fled in dismay, these young
men, and their young wives, remained at their posts,
buried the dead, and consoled, as well as they were able,
the living, winning a position that they will never lose.
The English residents presented them with a handsome
testimonial of their gratitude; and I could wish some
more enduring record of their bravery than these pages.

Sometimes a half dozen; sometimes ten persons, always
more or less, assembled on Sunday afternoon in the
rooms of Rev. Mr. Martin; and here we worshiped God
in the old home fashion, with the Psalms of David to
sing; and hence I am afraid that I must confess my
thoughts oftener than heavenward went wandering back

to the old meeting-house in the up-country, and the beloved
voices that sang the Psalms there in the long-gone
years, and that sing them now with David in the upper
country.

Days, weeks, and months, go dreamily along in this
old land, and the evenings and nights have holier starlight
and profounder depths of beauty than in any other
country that my feet have wandered through.

For the day-time, whether in the street among the
dark-browed, liquid-eyed sons of Ishmael, or wandering
over the hills around the city, and surveying the proud
sites of old glories, life was like a long dream.

Shall I ever forget that first evening after our arrival,
when Miriam and I, far wanderers together through life,
and to be yet farther wanderers together on hills of Holy
Land, stood on a mound to the northward of the city,
one of those inexplicable mounds of broken pottery, fifty,
a hundred feet high, and broken earthenware all of it,
which surround Cairo on the north and east, and looked
at the setting sun beyond the desert? A cool north wind
was blowing freshly. The donkeys stood facing it, their
sharp ears erect. The boys lay on the sand chattering in
Arabic to each other. The dragoman, in full and flowing
dress, a short distance in the rear, stood in that attitude
of grace that no one but an Oriental can hope to attain
to. We four, the only Americans in all the land of Egypt
who do not call this their home, stood close together,
watching the sun go down the western sky. It was high

noon at home. New York was bustling, shouting, noisy
New York; and in our homes—how much we would have
given to know of them at that instant—who can tell us
of the beloved ones there? The moon came out from the
sky, silver as never moon was silver to our eyes before.
The muezzin calls had ceased, and the faithful had ceased
to pray. As the night deepened, object after object disappeared,
and only Cairo the Blessed was before us, shining
in the soft light; but away on the horizon, standing
on the Libyan desert edge, calm, silent, solemn, and awful,
we still saw the majesty of the pyramids.

I was off, one morning, among the mosks of Cairo.
We directed our way first to the Mosk of Tooloon, which
is the oldest in the modern city.

This is said to be the precise copy in miniature of the
great mosk at Mecca, and it is certainly the most imposing
of the Mohammedan structures of Cairo. Its very
age makes it the more stately, though it is now desecrated
into a poor-house. It surrounds a square, each side of
which is perhaps four or six hundred feet long, and is
built with pointed arches, being the earliest known specimen
of the style. Its date is about A. D. 880, and its
huge columns stand as firmly as they stood a thousand
years ago. The minaret, on the western side of the
court, is constructed somewhat singularly, having a winding
stairway outside the tower. Whereof the tradition
is, that the founder, being reproached by his Grand
Vizier for wasting his time in twisting a piece of paper,
replied that he was planning a minaret to his new mosk
up which he might ride on horseback; and so it was
made. But it is not very similar, for the staircase makes
but one turn around the tower.

Nevertheless, it is profoundly interesting to stand in a
spot where, daily, for a thousand years, the prayers of
men have been offered up; where the stones are worn

with the knees of sincere if mistaken believers; where
there has never been a day, since the ninth century, when
the voice of the muezzin was not heard across the court
and through the shadowy arches, uttering that simple
and sublime passage that has been so often uttered above
this city, and all the East, that one might think the air
would sound it with its own morning winds forever after:
“God is great. There is no deity but God. Mohammed
is God's apostle. Come to prayer, come to prayer; prayer
is better than sleep; come to prayer. God is most great.
There is no god but God.”

At noonday and at sunsetting the same chant has filled
these arches with solemn melody. One can not stand and
hear it now without feeling that the voice is the same
voice that uttered it ten centuries ago, though the men
through whose thin lips it escaped on the air are the dead
dust of those centuries. Age is sublime. A creed, though
false, is nevertheless magnificent if it be old; and I can
not look on these tottering walls, these upheaving pavements,
these crumbling towers, without a melancholy regret
stealing in along with other feelings, that this worship,
this creed, is approaching its end, and that the day
is fast coming when Islam and the creed of the Prophet
will be to men like the memories of Isis and Apis—shadows
flitting around the ruins of old Egypt. In broad
daylight, when eyes and intellects are wide awake, the
shadows are as clouds dark with memories of crime and
wrong; shapes of hideous deeds, blackening the very
name of humanity.

But in night time and the moonlight, when we do not
see these, there will be shapes like halos around the fallen
minarets of Tooloon and Amer as around the obelisk of
Heliopolis and the unchanging pyramids; memories of
simple but grand faith in the hearts of old men that worship
God, and died in every year and month of all the

thousands that have shone upon these stones; shadows
that will forever haunt the places that are sanctified by
man's holiest emotions—sincere and prayerful trust in
God, though it were in a false god; shadows that are
changeful, but always there; long shapes and forms cast
on the walls by the altar-flames, that remain and appear,
and flit here and there on pavement and wall, though
altar-fires be long extinguished, and the wall lie in dust
on the broken pavements of the temple.

But is this so, and is the end approaching?

I asked myself the question in the city of Victory,
seated at my open window in the night-time, the moon
shining gloriously—a dazzling moon—my table drawn to
the window, and the flame of my candle rising steadily,
and without a flicker, in the profoundly silent air. Two
hundred thousand people were lying around me, and I
asked who and what they were, and what part they
formed in the grand sum of human valuation? Literally
nothing. They are not worth the counting among the
races of men. They are the curse of one of the fairest
lands on this earth's surface.

I had been conversing that same day with intelligent
Mussulmans who not only expressed their belief, but
added their anxious hope, that the advance of English
power in the East would soon make Egypt an English
possession. I heard this everywhere among them.

If they knew any thing about it—and Turks ought to
know more of it than Americans—they would see that it
is their manifest destiny. England begins to see it, as
before she has only wished it.

I answered my question, Yes, the end is not far distant.
The mosk of Amer, traditional metre of the duration of
the faith, is falling. I saw with my own eyes a huge piece
of its wall go crashing down into the dusty court, where

the still sunshine fell on it as if it had been waiting for it;
and no one will ever disturb its ruin.

Just before break of day, from the mosk of Mohammed
Ali at the citadel the morning call to prayer sounds over
the city. The Sultan Hassan, old Tooloon, and another
and another take it up, and three hundred voices are filling
the air with a rich, soft chant, that reaches the ear of the
Mussulman in his profoundest slumber, and calls him up
to pray. Does he obey? There was a time when, at that
call, the city of Salah-e'deen had no closed eye, no unbent
knee in all its walls. But the Mussulman is changed now.
He heard the call in his half drunken sleep, stupefied
with hashish, and he damned the muezzin, and turned
over to deeper slumber. He heard it in his profound repose,
after counting over the gains he had made by cheating
his neighbors, and he did not feel like praying. He
heard it on the perfumed couch of his slave, and he forgot
the prophet's in the present heaven. He heard it—yes,
there were a few old men, who remember the glory of
the Mamelukes; who heard their fierce shouts when the
Christian invaders met them at the pyramids; and who,
wearied with long life, look now for youth and rest in
heaven, and they, when they heard the call, obeyed it,
and theirs were the only prayers wasted on the dawning
light in all of Cairo, and when they cease there will be
none to pray.

This is no fancy picture. Mark the prophecy. Our
days may be few, but there are men living now who will
see the crescent disappear from the valley of the Nile,
and who will build their houses from the sacred stones of
the mightiest mosks in Grand Cairo. The beginning of
this end is visible already, but who can foresee what is to
follow?

SHEIK HOUSSEIN IBN-EGID.

Who that has read eastern travel books for the last
half century has not heard the fame of the great Sheik
of the Alaween? I remember when I was a boy that I
sympathized deeply with some one, of whose robbery by
the redoubted sheik I read a sorrowful history, and after
that, in book after book, as I heard of this and that traveler
driven away from Petra by this old man, or robbed
by his extortions, I used to think it would be a pleasant
morning's walk to meet him and rid the desert of such an
enemy of safe journeying. What a capital shot it would
be at the robber sheik, with a cut rifle and a well-greased
ball! These boyish notions never left me, and I frequently
caught myself wondering whether I should ever meet the
sheik and fight him or fly him.

I met him when I least expected it.

As we were riding up the Mouski, Miriam and myself,
on our way to the bazaars one afternoon, we were startled
and arrested by an apparition that was not to be allowed
to pass unnoticed.

Seated on a splendid sorrel mare, whose quick roving
eye was ill at ease in the street of the city, was an old
man, whose face was the face of a king. His dress was
rich and elegant, but such as we had not yet seen in
Cairo. He wore no shoes, stockings, nor trowsers. The

dust of the desert was on his bare feet and ankles. Over
a shirt of the richest brocade was worn a cloak of crimson
cloth worked with gold, and over this a cloak of black,
concealing all that was under it, except when it was exposed
by accident. A cashmere sash was wound around
his waist, binding the shirt only, in the folds of which
gleamed pistols and knives more than I could count. His
head was covered with a shawl of brown silk, the heaviest
work of the looms of Damascus, and it was held in its
place by a woolen cord, heavy enough to hang a man,
wound around the crown of his head above the forehead
and ears.

But the dress, strange and elegant as it was, was a
matter of subsequent observation to us. It was the face
of the man that struck us, and riveted our attention. He
was an old man. I did not then know how old. But his
eye was brighter than the eye of a young eagle. The
suns of the desert for a hundred years had not served to
dim one ray of its brilliance. I never saw such an eye.
It pierced me through and through. His features were
chiseled with the sharpest regularity, and his eye lit them
up so that he seemed every inch a prince. And yet he
was of diminutive form, small, slender, and his naked foot,
that rested in the shovel stirrup, was thin and bony to the
extreme.

We had with us Mohammed Abd-el-Atti, a young
Egyptian dragoman, with whom we were about closing
an arrangement for our voyage southward. As we approached
the Bedouin sheik, Abd-el-Atti sprang from his
donkey and rushed up to him, seizing his hand and kissing
it, and the two exchanged the long series of Oriental
blessings, with alternate touches of the breast and forehead,
which invariably signalize a meeting between friends
long parted.

Meantime we stood looking curiously at the scene, and

in a few moments the old sheik turned his horse toward
us, and Abd-el-Atti informed me that he was my old enemy
the Sheik Houssein Ibn-egid, the most powerful of
the Bedouin chiefs from Cairo to Mecca.

The old man touched my hand, and as we each lifted
our fingers to our lips after the grasp, we exchanged a
long, steadfast gaze, which seemed to satisfy him, for he
laughed quietly to himself, and he asked me if I were
going to Wâdy Mousa. Probably he thought me worth
robbing, as he saw a lady in my company, and such parties
are usually best stocked with plunderable articles.

Sheik Houssein is an old man. Here men say that he is
over a hundred years of age, and that his descendants of
the fourth generation are full grown men, stout and strong
on the desert. Be this as it may, he is a man well known
in the world, and his fame has gone from Europe to
America in the letters of travelers who have met him on
the desert among his five thousand followers. There he
is a chieftain to be dreaded. He has but to lift a handful
of dust and blow it into the air with his thin old lips, and
three thousand Bedouins are in the saddle at his call. He
is the guardian of Petra, with whom all who desire to see
the Rock City must make peace and friendship.

But how came the Sheik Houssein within the walls of
a city, and how came his mare to be treading the filthy
streets of Cairo, through the narrow passages shut out
from the sky—for where we met them there was no sky
visible, the street itself being roofed over with reeds to
keep out the sun? The story is somewhat long, but I
will make it as brief as possible.

Some time ago the caravan from Suez to Cairo was
robbed of a camel loaded with indigo. The Sheik Ibn-sh-deed,
who rules the desert from Cairo to the Red Sea,
is responsible to the government of Egypt for the safety
of the caravan. He has hostages in the city to secure

that responsibility. It was immediately evident that none
of his tribe had committed the theft, and it was soon as
evident that it was the act of two men belonging to a
tribe nearer to Akaba, and bordering on the tribes that
owe allegiance to the Sheik Houssein. Indeed, some evidence
was given that they were actually men under that old Sheik's power.

Among the Arabs still prevails that patriarchal form of
government which makes the sheik the father of his entire
tribe. If one of them is in trouble—it matters nothing
whether it be his son or the poorest wretch of his
retainers—he will sacrifice his life for him, and every man
of the entire tribe is bound to do the same. The veneration
for the sheik, and his care over them, is in every
respect like that of a father for his sons, and children for
their parent. Accordingly, when one is known to have
committed a crime, no trouble is taken to catch him.
Any one of the same tribe is quite the same thing. Arrest
him if you can, bring him to Cairo, and send word
to his sheik that he will remain in prison till the thief is
produced at the prison-door, and all the tribe are at work
instantly to secure the right man, taking care at first to
exhaust all means of effecting the escape of the one who
has been taken.

Ramadan Effendi, one of the officers of government in
high standing, the third officer in the Transit Department
—who is the cousin and the brother-in-law of Abd-el-Atti
—went on an expedition to catch one of the tribe at
whose door lay the charge of this robbery. How adroitly
he managed his business; how he inveigled two of
them into an ambuscade, and then sprang on them and
bound them; how the whole tribe dogged his returning
way with his captives; how he took them in one of the
passenger vans to cross from Suez among the English
passengers, and thus escaped the vigilance of the Bedouins;

and how he deposited them in chains, under bolt
and bar, in Cairo, had been the subject of town talk for
a month past among those who had known the circumstances.
Still there remained a doubt as to whether
the robbers were of this tribe, and it was desirable to
catch a man from the tribes that acknowledge the supremacy
of the Sheik Houssein, and thus make the matter
certain.

I went to the prison to see these caged eagles—call
them rather vultures—but they were splendid fellows.
One of them was the son of the sheik of his tribe, and
is celebrated as the man who dared to brave Mohammed
Ali. Not many years ago, when that bold man had imprisoned
the Sherreef of Mecca in the citadel of Cairo,
this Bedouin came under the wall of the citadel on the
desert side—where it is fifty feet high—and, with ropes
and his own sharp wit to aid him, entered the citadel,
liberated the sherreef, lowered him to the desert sand,
placed him on his own dromedary, and, with a shout of
triumph, dashed away into the desert. Eighty horses, of
the swiftest that the viceroy possessed, in vain followed
the escaped captive.

He sat and smoked his pipe calmly as I stood and
looked at him. It was strongly suspected that he was
one of the robbers himself. It was very certain that he
would hang at the Bab Zouaileh if some one else were
not speedily taken.

But the caravan of the pilgrims from Mecca was coming
over the desert. This is the annual event of Cairo.
The departure and the return of the Hadg are the two
great festivals of the year, and the caravan had just
arrived on the desert outside the city on the day of which
I speak—and was waiting the order of the pasha to enter
the gates and march in procession to the citadel. Three
thousand camels were scattered here and there over the

sand-hills, and the scene was one of the finest and most
picturesque pageants that we have ever witnessed.

A glance at the map will show any reader that the pilgrims,
in crossing from Mecca to Cairo, pass immense
deserts, and, of course, through the dominions of various
Bedouin tribes. To each of these tribes the Hadg pays
a certain sum for protection and safe passage. By special
instructions sent to them this year, the officers in
charge of the caravan made a dispute with Sheik Houssein,
on passing through his country, as to the kind of
dollar to be paid to him—the rate having been fixed in
piastres. The Hadg offered the sheik French dollars at
current rates, and he demanded, as no doubt he was entitled,
to receive them at government rates, which would
give him about three piastres more on every twenty.
The result was that they refused to pay him any thing
until they should arrive at Cairo, and settle the dispute
there. To this he agreed, and accompanied the caravan
to Cairo; and he was just entering the city when we met
him in the Mouski.

A fate that he little anticipated awaited him. While
we talked in the street, some fifty soldiers had gathered
around us, and the old man found himself arrested.

But he was not the man to exhibit emotion. No one
would have supposed that the occurrence was other than
what he had come for, as he quietly asked me to go with
him to the diwan of Mustapha Capitan.

It was impossible to desert him under such circumstances.
Indeed I had no objection to seizing an opportunity
of befriending this universal enemy of travelers:
Accordingly we rode with him, two hundred yards, to
the Transit office.

We were shown into an upper room, where sat Mustapha
Capitan, the chief officer of the Transit Department
at Cairo, and Ramadan Effendi, who is the next in rank.

Mustapha occupied the corner of the diwan, and room
was immediately made for Miriam and myself on his
right, where we sat while coffee was served. Ramadan
sat on our left, Abd-el-Atti being at hand to interpret in
case of necessity. The room was crowded to suffocation
with men in every variety of eastern costume, not less
than fifty of them being Bedouins of every tribe between
Jerusalem, Mecca, Akaba, and Cairo; the Sheik
Ibrahim, whose tribe is between Gaza and Heliopolis,
with a dozen of his followers—dark, swarthy fellows, in
blankets and shawls; Ibn-sh-deed, whom I have before
mentioned, with as many of his retainers; Suleiman,
from Akaba, a noble-looking man, with a fine, intelligent
face, clothed in a brown robe, over a brown silk shirt,
with a shawl of the same color on his head, the ends of
which hung to his feet, and with him three darker and
more devilish-looking Bedouins than I have elsewhere
seen. If one met them on the desert, one would commence
turning his pockets wrong side out before they
had opened their lips.

The diwan extended across the upper end of the room.
In front of it was a small open space, in the centre of
which the old sheik stood, and behind him those that I
have named, in a semicircle, and then the dense mass in
the lower part of the room.

It was not necessary to explain to Sheik Houssein why
he was detained. He heard them speaking of the lost
camel, and he knew the story well, for every Bedouin in
Arabia knew it a month ago. But he strode forward
into the semicircle, and while he gathered his cloak
around him with his left hand, raised his thin right
hand over his head, and stood in an attitude of grace
that I have never but once seen equaled. The resemblance
to the North American Indian was startling.
Every gesture was similar; and the eloquence was the

same natural flow of fierce, biting, furious words, yet full
of imagery and beauty. I understood but little Arabic
as yet, but I could follow him through nearly all that he
said—asking Abd-el-Atti occasionally for a word or an
idea—so perfect was his gesture, and in such perfect
keeping with his subject.

Occasionally Mustapha interrupted him with a question,
and he replied. The substance of what he said was
that he knew of the robbery, knew who did it, knew
where the man, camel, and indigo all were, but that they
were all out of his jurisdiction; they were in the adjoining
tribe, and he would not undertake to catch the thief,
simply because it was none of his business. If he should
do it, his own life would not be worth an hour's purchase;
and there was no reason why he should throw it away for
Said Pasha, a man to whom he owed nothing, and whom
he did not love, respect, or fear. If the government of
Egypt wanted the man enough to send an officer for him
who would take the responsibility of catching him, then
he would aid him; but he would not risk his life to do
that in which he had no interest.

Some severe expressions were used by Mustapha Capitan,
which roused the old sheik's anger, and he shook his
fore finger, while the room rang with his deep, guttural
voice. “I am an old man; I knew Said Pasha's father;
and long before Mohammed Ali sat on the diwan in Cairo I
was sheik in Wâdy Mousa. Said Pasha may think him
self somewhat of a man, because he is in the seat of his
father. My son, you are a boy. You have caught me
in Cairo; but if I meet you outside the gates of your
city—if I meet you on the desert sand—I will show you
who is Sheik Houssein! Kill me here now, if you dare:
and I have five sons, old men all, who will seek my blood
on the stones of Cairo. No, no, Mustapha Capitan; no
no, Hassan Pasha; Sheik Houssein is not to be treated

like a boy! What will become of your caravan next
year, and the year after that? Send ten thousand men
with it to guard it by the mountains of Sheik Houssein,
and from every rock and hiding-place, will he rain
death on them, and the ten thousand men will lie on the
sands. You dare not harm this old head! I am not
afraid of you, though I stand here in your strong house,
in the heart of your great city. The man does not live
who dares to harm me. Woe be to you, Mustapha Capitan,
wee be to Said Pasha, if I go not out free from
Cairo and unharmed!”

The room was silent for a moment, as the old man
took breath after this burst of defiance, and then every
voice rang at once in a storm of dissension, dispute, demand,
refusal, defiance, anger, and fury. This subsided
as Sheik Houssein again raised his voice, and hurled
his anathemas on Said Pasha and the Egyptian government.
Meantime Mustapha Capitan sat calmly in the
corner of the diwan, and Miriam and myself sat as calmly
by his side. I confess that I thought once or twice that
if this storm of words should result as it would have been
likely to result in any other part of the world, our chance
would have been poor to reach the door through a hundred
Arabs, every one of them fully armed.

But the audience was over. Mustapha had had enough
of the sheik, and he broke up the sitting by a nod. We
went out with the crowd; and as the room opened out
on the large roof of the lower building, the Bedouins sat
down on the stones of the roof, and we sat down in a circle
composed of the four sheiks that I have mentioned
and ourselves, attended by Abd-el-Atti. Here we remained
an hour longer, listening to the wily attempts of
the others to persuade the old man into a promise to
produce the thief. It was in vain; he was not to be
caught. Accordingly I proposed to Abd-el-Atti to take

the old man with us and visit the other prisoners. I was
anxious to see their meeting. He went with us.

As he entered the prison-door they advanced to meet
him; and the first one, the son of a sheik, met him with
outstretched arms, kissing him on each cheek, and receiving
his kiss in return, then pressing his forehead against
the old man's forehead, both standing silent and motionless
for thirty seconds in that graceful and strange position,
their eyes fixed on the ground. The other prisoner
received a similar salute, but not so impressive. The first
prisoner was dressed in the plainest and most common
gray blanket of the Bedouins. It was wound around his
body, and the corner was thrown over his head; and
yet his slave, who had come to him from his far-off
home across the desert, was as richly dressed as any man
in the assembly, in silk and cashmere, and I might also
have remarked, was one of the loudest talkers in the
audience-room; for here slaves talk freely before their
masters, and dispute with them fearlessly.

Mustapha Capitan ordered the Sheik Houssein to be
detained in the prison all night. Woe to Mustapha if he
sets his foot on the desert sand east of Suez after this.

I asked Abd-el-Atti if there was not such a process as
giving bail known to Moslem law. There was, but it was
only honor. If a man of reputation would promise on
his religion to produce the prisoner, he might be given
into his custody.

So we arranged it. I never knew exactly how much
my word had to do with it, or whether it was Abd-el-Atti's
religion or mine that Mustapha Capitan depended
on. Abd-el-Atti arranged it with Mustapha Capitan,
guarantying his appearance when the government should
call for him. The sheik was handed over to him and
he brought him down to me at the hotel.

After this he remained for two weeks our constant attendant,

passing the nights with Abd-el-Atti at his house
and reporting himself every morning to the authorities.
He was all this time like a caged tiger, quiet, but with a
furious eye. His gratitude to Abd-el-Atti, for saving him
from that worst affliction known to an Arab, a night under
bolt and bar, knew no bounds. He prayed God that
he might see him at Wâdy Mousa, and as he was old he
promised the gratitude of his sons and descendants to remote
generations.

“What will you do to Abd-el-Atti, when he comes to
your tent?” I asked.

He turned his eye up to Abd-el-Atti with a good-natured
laugh, and drew his finger across his throat.

I laughed at his jesting threat, and asked him what he
would do to Mustapha Capitan if he ever came to Wâdy
Mousa. His face sobered in an instant; he looked
with his flashing eyes at me, and was silent for a moment.
Then he growled rather than spoke,

“You know very well what I will do to Mustapha
Capitan or to Said Pasha, if either of them comes within
my reach.”

“How old are you?” I asked him, as we sat smoking
our chibouks in affectionate proximity one morning at the
front door of Williams's hotel under the shade of the lebbek
trees.

“My children's grand-children ride on horses,” was the
reply.

While he remained with us, I had his photograph taken
by an artist who was passing through Cairo on his way
to India. The old man sat like a statue. The first impression
taken proved a failure, and, after an interval of
ten minutes, the artist proposed to seat him again. It
was unnecessary. He was in the chair, and he had not
moved hand or foot—I don't think he had winked—since
the first sitting.

This picture is an accurate likeness of a Bedouin sheik
in full costume, precisely as we were accompanied by him
from day to day; the reader may rely on the accuracy
of the camera, and not suppose that fancy has added a
line.

The administration of justice in Egypt is a curious affair.
As I was riding homeward that day, after leaving
the old man of the desert, I met a camel carrying a large
box which contained a huge tiger. The animal was
growling furiously, as every swing of the camel sent him
now to one end of the cage and now to the other. I was
comparing him to the old chief. Never were two more
alike. While I was looking at him, two tall stout men,
Europeans, dismounted from donkeys which they had
hired, and refused to pay the owner for them. On his
insisting, one of them struck him. Whereat he became
more earnest in his demands for his money, but, was still
perfectly respectful, though he held the Frank firmly by
the folds of his dress. The latter, enraged at the pertinacity
of the Arab, struck him with his cane, and then
gave him a terrible beating. I never saw a man so
thoroughly thrashed. He struck him over his head and
back, his legs and his bare arms, bringing blood at every
blow. He beat him across the street and actually into
the open court of the police office, where sat fifteen or
twenty police officers, smoking sedately and calmly. No
one of them moved from his seat, or spoke. Twenty
other donkey men rushed in to the rescue, and the Frank
broke his cane over the head of his victim, and then took

to European swearing. The next instant he rushed out
into the street, around the corner of the building, to an
old man who sells bamboo and rattans, bought a stout
bamboo for a piastre, and returned to the charge. Again
the poor Arab took it, and when he was thoroughly tired
the Frank left the crowd and walked along the street as
coolly as if he had but been whipping a dog.

This is an every day occurrence in the streets of the
city, and I mention it in connection with the arrest of
the Sheik Houssein as showing what experience I had in
one afternoon of the manner of administering justice in
Cairo the Blessed.

The explanation of this strange scene in the police office
is this.

By our treaty with Turkey, and by the treaties of all
civilized nations, it is provided that no American, Englishman,
or in general no citizen or subject of either of the
powers so protected by treaty, shall be tried for any offense
by Turkish law, but every offender shall be tried by
the law of his own land. The substance of this is, that he
shall be handed over to the consul of his government, and
he sends him home for trial without witnesses—of course
without possibility of conviction.

Hence foreigners may commit crime with absolute impunity,
except for the blood revenge, which authorizes
and requires relatives to avenge the death of their connections.

As a result of this, every consul in Egypt has, what are
called protegés, the list varying from hundreds up to
thousands. I beg especial attention to this enormity of
fraud, in which our government is an innocent participator,
a fraud on the Egyptian and Turkish governments
which all civilized nations are combined in perpetrating.

Our present consul, Mr. De Leon, is, I believe, totally
free from any blame in the matter. He found a list of

American subjects, entitled to protection, left him by his
predecessors, and he has done what he could to diminish
the extent of the injury to the nation which this system
brings about. But what is he alone among the crowd
of foreign consuls, each one a petty sovereign by virtue
of this system. Its ramifications extend everywhere in
Turkish dominions. I found it at Jaffa, at Jerusalem, at
Smyrna, and at Constantinople.

Out of this system wholly arose the Kosta difficulty,
and though this has given us a terrible reputation in the
East, and one which secures profound respect for Americans,
because the Mediterranean nations have gotten the
idea that we are a filibustering nation, ready to come and
seize on their ports, palaces, and thrones, yet this whole
thing was wrong from beginning to ending.

No one in America understood precisely how the
thing could occur, or how the commodore and consul
dared to act as they did. But this system explains it.
If Kosta had been a full-blooded Turk, and never out of
Turkey in his life, had his name been found on the consul's
lists of protegés, the same course would have been
taken in carrying out the system. There are hundreds
of such names on our consuls' lists! Men who never
breathed any freer air than that of Mohammedan countries
—whose forefathers, to the days of Esau, were
Asian, and whom their own government dare not lay
finger on, because of this claim of protection on the part
of the American government. Observe how it works.
A Jew, doubtless direct in his line of descent from the
Jews of the time of Jeremiah in Egypt, whose father,
and grandfather, and great grandfather, were money-
changers in the Jews' quarter of Cairo, killed a man in
the street, and was arrested and imprisoned. An Englishman
who saw him kill the man, and who caused his
arrest, is my informant.

His conviction was certain; his guilt clear as daylight.

But, two days after his arrest, he sent for the French
consul, had a long interview with him, and the next day
the consul showed his name in his list of protegés, and
demanded his delivery to him. The government, of
course, yielded to the demand.

As a necessary consequence of this system travelers
have no protection against each other, and, on the river,
every man looks to his arms as his only guard.

The time has arrived when this system should be
changed. It is iniquitous, from first to last, and it is
only in the fact that our present consul, Mr. De Leon, is
an able, upright, and trustworthy man, that Americans
can have any confidence for safety while in Egypt.

In connection with this subject, I may here speak of
the general administration of justice in Egypt.

The days of Mohammed Defterdar are passed, and
better times are come; still the wheels of justice move
much on golden axles, and there is room for great reforms
in justice and in practice.

The viceroy is an autocrat. He says kill, and they
kill.

While I was in Cairo, he gave Mohammed Bey, chief
of the police in Cairo, seven days in which to detect a
murderer, and on the eighth morning, the murderer being
still at large, his friends had permission to bury Mohammed
Bey's headless trunk.

The religion is the only law of the country. By it the
Khadee rules and judges as he did in the days of Haroun
el Rasheed.

I heard one day that a murder had been committed in
the broad street of the city, and I went over to the police
office to see the process of justice in such a case.

It was a curious scene. On the floor of the room sat
the prisoner, literally loaded with chains. He had a chain

on each wrist, and one as heavy as a small ship's-cable
going around his body and over his shoulders. It was a
ridiculous formality, too; for it was very manifest that
he had but to shake himself and they would drop off,
even to the last link.

Opposite to him sat four women, facing him. They
were heavily vailed, but they watched him with flashing
eyes. They were the relations of the dead man, attending
here to see that he was avenged. The law of blood
for blood is omnipotent.

I inquired into the process of the law with such a man.

“When will he be tried?”

“In a month or two.”

“Do you make up any calendar of cases for trial?”

“Oh, no.”

“How do you remember that such a case is to be
tried?”

“They (the women) will see that we don't forget him.”

“Is there no other way of remembering it?”

“None; the blood revenge will keep them active.
We shall need no other reminder.”

“Where will he remain meanwhile?”

“In prison.”

“At whose expense?”

“His own.”

“Do you feed prisoners?”

“Not a mouthful.”

“Who does feed them?”

“Their friends.”

“If they have none?”

“What?”

“If they have no friends?”

“Never heard of such a case.”

“But if it did occur?”

“I suppose he must starve.”

Such is the simple routine of justice. Primitive, and
certainly effective. I have no doubt that justice is as
evenly administered in this same Cairo, as in Christian
New York or London. Look ye to it, who would make
Christian lands better than Moslem!

Shortly after my first interview with Sheik Houssein,
the procession of the Makhmil took place, which is the
final breaking-up of the annual pilgrimage, by depositing
the Makhmil in the mosk of Mohammed Ali at the citadel.

This procession is ordinarily one of the grandest events
of the Cairene year. The departure of the pilgrims is
the time for more display, but the scene is not more interesting,
perhaps not as interesting.

The caravan had been waiting on the desert, outside
the city walls, for the pasha's order that it should enter,
and this at length was issued at a late hour on the evening
before. No one knew of it, and we should not
have heard of it but for the faithfulness of our servant,
who was up at his prayers before daylight, as every good
Mussulman should be, and saw the soldiers passing on
their way out of the city to meet the caravan; so he came
and roused me, and called a carriage instanter. It had
been decided beforehand that we should have a carriage
instead of going on donkeys, because, in the first place,
we should be better able to see in a crowd, and in the
second place, should be less liable to insult from the crowd.
For on the day of this procession, from time immemorial,
Mussulmans have been permitted to insult Christians with
impunity, and the boys are accustomed to do so.

The Makhmil is a somewhat curious affair. Few Mohammedans
can tell you what it is, though they venerate
it, and look forward and back to its arrival as the great
event of the religious year.

Long years ago—let us not be particular about dates—

a certain royal lady, a queen, made the pilgrimage to
Mecca, and for her use had a gorgeous car or camel litter
made, in which she rode all the way. The next year she
did not go on the pilgrimage, but she sent her camel and
her litter, and it was carried by the pilgrims each successive
year, until they forgot the origin of the custom and
made it a religious rite. Each year a most gorgeous
canopy is made—a new one every year—at the expense
of the government, and this goes and returns empty. On
its return, it is held most sacred. The people rush to
touch it with their fingers. They press their foreheads
and lips to the fringe, and rejoice at the blessing their
eyes have in looking at it.

We were effectually insured against insult when we
met Sheik Houssein and took him into the carriage. The
old man did not exactly like to sit in such an affair. He
said he preferred to be on his horse, and when Miriam
explained to him that we much preferred carriages in
our cities, he promised that when she came to Wâdy
Mousa, he would give her such a horse as would make
her forswear all wheeled vehicles thenceforth. He looked
anxiously around him as we went along through the
crowd that was pouring to the part of the city where the
procession was to pass. We drove on rapidly, a runner
preceding us and clearing the way. I wished to reach
the Bab el Nasr, the gate of victory, before the entrance
of the procession, but I was too late for it. We met
them in the narrowest part of the way, and the officers
who preceded the procession turned our horses' heads,
so that we were obliged to head the procession and drive
back till we came to a convenient turn out, where we
could stop and let them pass. This place we found and
there saw them.

The Procession was headed by the camels which had
accompanied the Hadj to Mecca and back. Then followed

the escort of cavalry and foot sent out to meet theme
Behind these came the sacred camel, bearing the makhmil.
It was indeed a gorgeous affair, blazing with the purest
gold. No tinsel work about this. Its value was incalculable.
The camel was almost hidden by the fringe of
precious metal, and the balls and crescents shone like suns
and moons. The whole crowd shouted and did reverence
to it as it passed.

The Mohammedan sign of reverence is made by placing
the palm of the open hand on the forehead, and drawing
it down to the chin; every man, woman, and child did
this, and then shouted. The air rang with the peculiar
cry of joy which the women utter on all festive occasions,
a long gurgling sound that no one can imitate who is not
born in the East. Behind the makhmil, on a camel, sat a
derweesh, naked to the waist, who is a somewhat celebrated
character, and an important part of the procession. His
head rolls as if it were not attached to his shoulders, but
only lay there, and every motion of the camel sent it
around. This motion is never known to stop from the
time the makhmil leaves the citadel of Cairo on its way to
Mecca until its return. Possibly in the night time, when
no one is near, he may rest and sleep, but this is denied,
and it is asserted and believed that he never rests an instant
or ceases this strange motion.

Following him are the camels of the pilgrims, with
their canopies and their families in them. The camel litter
is composed of two boxes, swung on opposite sides of the
camel, covered with one tent-like canopy. In each box
are some of the riders, or possibly they balance the person
on one side by the baggage on the other, if the family is
not large enough to fill both.

These are the desert ships of old fame. Five thousand
of them were in the caravan when they left Suez, but
more than two thousand hastened on, and had been scattered

to their various homes a week or more before the
arrival of the main body. Hence the procession was not
as full as usual.

After the camels came the guard of the caravan, a regiment
of wild-looking rascals of every nation under the
eastern sun, dressed in more costumes than there are
countries in Asia and Africa, and these closed the procession,
which was altogether the strangest that we have
ever been witnesses of. They passed us and went on
through the Bab Zouaileh, which is one of the most
stately edifices in the city, and so on up to the citadel.
The Bab Zouaileh is, as its name imports, a gate. Before
the days of Salah-e'deen it was the most southern gate
of Cairo, but when that prince extended the city, and
built the citadel, this gate was left in the midst of the
houses, and stands to this day a monument of the greatness
of that celebrated warrior.

It is withal one of the most sacred places in Cairo, and
while superstition even among Mussulmans shrinks from
public gaze, here it is displayed to the utmost.

The Kutb is the most holy of the Mohammedan saints.
No man can tell who, what, or where he is. His residence is
always in the flesh, always in some Mussulman. That man
knows it, and only he. When he dies, it passes to another.
This Kutb, or Wellee, has the gift of ubiquity, or rather
the power of instantaneous change of place. One gate of
the Bab Zouaileh is never closed, but has stood for hundreds
of years shut back against the wall of the archway.
Behind this is the place of the Kutb, where oftentimes the
passing Mohammedan casts a sudden look, hoping to see
him.

Upon this gate every Mohammedan who has had a
tooth-ache, hangs the extracted tooth, thinking thereby
to be insured against a recurrence of the malady. Hence
the gate presents, as may well be imagined, a curious appearance.

Some hundreds of grinders of every size and
sort are placed in the cracks, or attached by strings to
various parts of the massive portal; and a dentist might
make his fortune by selecting from them. Some of them
are inclosed in small bags, but the large majority are in
their native purity, or impurity.

Over the gate did hang until it fell away in the winds,
the rope by which Toman Bey, the last sultan of the
Baharite dynasty, was hung in 1517, and until very recently
the ghastly heads of the slaughtered Mamelukes
grinned on the turrets above it. Without the gate is the
spot still used for the execution of certain criminals, although
it is now a crowded bazaar.

The procession over, I drove back to the hotel, dropping
the sheik on the way. His release at length came.
The government paid him off, and allowed him to depart.
He came down to bid me good-by, and urged me to visit
him in Wâdy Mousa.

We parted excellent friends. He promised me all manner
of attentions in Wâdy Mousa, if I would come, and
I have no doubt he would have treated me nobly. But I
never saw him again, and the old man will be dead when
I go to Wâdy Mousa. I heard of him in the following
spring. As I was groping my way by torchlight through the
grand caverns that underlie the north-east corner of Jerusalem,
a gentleman who was with me on that curious
exploration, and who was one of an English party just
arrived across the desert from Cairo, happened to mention
Petra.

“Did you go to Petra?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why, the old Sheikh of the Alaween—”

“Sheikh Houssein Ibn-egid?”

“Yes—do you know him?”

“I think I do;” and I laughed loud and long, without
waiting for his story, for I knew that my old friend was
at his work again. He had scared them away from
Wâdy Mousa. But I had faith to believe that he would
be glad to see me there.

How I wandered about the streets of Cairo; how I
visited the citadel, and again and again explored that
deep rock-hewn well of Yusef Salah-e'deen, known as the
well of Joseph; how I stood, hour by hour, on the front
of the unfinished palace of Mohammed Ali, and looked
off at the Nile and the pyramids; how, day by day, we
rode down to the boat, and watched her progress in
fitting up, and bargained here and there for provisions
and powder, flags and frying-pans, hams and hammers;
how, in one of my hasty gallops up the Mouski, my
donkey slipped and plunged me into the open arms of an
old Turk, whom I was compelled to console by buying of
him a half dozen of brandy, which brandy, O friend, bear
in mind when I come to tell of the ascent of the cataract;
how Trumbull and myself consulted all night about the
comforts for the ladies, and worked all day on little
nothings which seemed of huge importance then; how
we smoked pounds of Latakea over our volumes of
Champollion, and the maps of Jacotin which Trumbull,
with infinite skill, had copied in America, and brought
with him; how we rode out to the superb Shoubra
gardens of Halim Pasha, the viceroy's brother, and
sunned ourselves in the corridor that ran around the
great fountain wherein foolish and false tradition saith

Mohammed Ali was accustomed to keep pet crocodiles,
and overturn boat-loads of his wives; how we did not
see the fair odalisques in these bowers, as one fanciful
author describes his own good luck, for the reason that
they are never open when the ladies are abroad in them,
but then rigorously shut even to men slaves of the pasha;
how we dreamed away a month of luxurious life in El
Kahira the Victorious: are not all these things for our
own memories, and too much and too many to be recited
here?

Abd-el-Atti was a young, well-built, active Egyptian,
with a face much like a North American Indian's. His
complexion was copper-colored, his eyes black and rather
unsteady. After the Nile voyage I took him with me to
Syria; and, having had him for a servant during nearly
eight months of constant travel, I think I know the man
perfectly.

His temper was violent, but I had no difficulty with it.
Like all dragomans, he was anxious to make money, and
could see but one view of a money question. I had no
trouble with him on that score either. If I yielded to
him in one instance, I made him yield in the next. If the
traveler will look out for his temperament, and treat him
kindly, as a good servant should be treated, I have no
hesitation in recommending him as the most accomplished
dragoman in Egypt or the East.

He had lived some years in England and France, spoke
the language of those countries, Italian, Turkish, and
his own, the Arabic—read and wrote Arabic well, which
was a great desideratum for our purposes, and had seen
travel and adventure enough to be able to tell and manufacture
large stories for our amusement, when there was
nothing better to do. I give here our contract with him
verbatim.

Contract.

We, the undersigned, J. Hammond Trumbull, and W.
C. Prime, with Mrs. Trumbull and Mrs. Prime, have this
day agreed with Mohammed Abd-el-Atti for a trip up the
Nile, on the following conditions:

Dated, at Cairo, this 27th day of October, 1855.

N. B. The boat is to be procured and equipped, and
the trip to commence as soon as possible.

Signed by the Americans.
Sealed by Mohammed Abd-el-Atti.

Under this contract he selected a boat, which we examined
and approved, and he proceeded to fit and furnish
her. When this was done we hoisted the American
flag, and, for a signal, a white flag with one large blue
star in the centre, and named her from the name of a
boat not unknown to fame in our home circles, The
Phantom.

There was something pleasant in the idea of calling our
Nile boat, that spread her lofty wings on the air, white
and very ghost-like in the light of a November moon
in Egypt, by the name of that gallant boat which has
weathered so many Atlantic gales along the coast of
America, and with which many recollections of pleasant
days, and pleasant life, and beloved friends, are connected.

But she was a very different craft. Seventy feet long
by thirteen broad, she carried a mast stepped away forward,

about thirty feet high. On the top of this, swinging
by a rough rope tackle, was the long yard, tapering
from one heavy end below to a point sixty or seventy feet
above the deck, and this carried the large triangular sail.
Another smaller mast, stepped at the extreme stern, on
the after-rail, carried a small sail of the same shape, which
was managed by ropes rigged out on a pole projecting
ten feet behind the boat.

The cabins occupied all the after part of the boat, and
rose five feet above the deck, the floor being sunk two
feet below it. Thus we had ample height of ceiling, and
with a dining-room, one large and two small sleeping-rooms,
closets, and wash-room, we had a small house in
which four persons could live very comfortably. The
furniture of the boat was oriental, of course; but two
American rocking-chairs, part of a Yankee importation
into Alexandria two years ago, made things look somewhat
natural within the cabin, and no one could suggest
an improvement on our arrangements.

Darkest of Nubians externally, and brightest in intellect,
was Ferraj, our first cabin servant. Never was there
a blacker or a better fellow. Ten years ago, Abd-el-Atti
found a crowd of slaves at Wâdy Halfeh, in the slave-pen
on the bank of the river. He took a bag of dates in his
hand, went among them, and sprinkled them on the
ground. The black crowd sprang after them, and gathered
them up gladly. He saw one small boy of seven or
eight that was unable to get any, and he was struck with
his appearance. Eight pounds bought him. He named him
Ferraj (Trusty), and took him to Cairo. From that time
they have been inseparable, and their affection for each
other is an excellent illustration of that ordinarily subsisting
between master and slave in oriental countries. He
taught him to read—an accomplishment in this country
which but one in a thousand can boast of—and having

brought him up with the utmost care, made him a good
Mussulman and a first-rate servant. He gave him fifty
pounds and his freedom two years ago. But they are as
inseparable as ever, and the Nubian always accompanies
his master on his expeditions with travelers. He is not
more than eighteen, but would pass for twenty-two, and
stands six feet in his stockings.

Ferraj remained with us as long as Abd-el-Atti, and it
would be almost impossible to say how much we became
attached to him. Seek him out, Q traveler to Egypt, and
thank me for telling you of a treasure to a wandering
Howajji.

Hassan, the boy, was about fifteen, with a face of perfect
beauty, even for a woman's. It was a luxury to look
at his dark olive complexion, and into his deep thoughtful
eyes. He, too, spoke a little English, but not so much as
Ferraj. The latter could think English, if he could not
speak it always.

“What's that?” I asked him one morning, as he
brought in a dish and placed it on the table at breakfast.

“I not know what you call it. It's what—is—in my head,”
and he laid his hand on his wool, thereby to signify
that it was a dish of brains!

One morning, as we sat smoking at the door of the
hotel, Abd-el-Atti brought up a little shut-eyed, laughing
Egyptian, dressed in flowing trowsers and embroidered
vest and jacket, with a turban of voluminous folds
on his head, and red slippers, with sharp up-turned toes,
on his feet.

“This is Hajji Mohammed Mustapha, the cook.”

I looked at him and at Trumbull. Trumbull looked at
him and at me.

I was faithless, but submissive. How gloriously I was
converted. What royal dishes, what inventions of genius

worthy of Ude, what gastronomic powers that wily
little Egyptian possessed. I took him to Syria, too. I
would have brought him here if I could. His resources
were inexhaustible, and he needed thrashing only once
in all my dealings with him; that was when an English
gentleman, who had dined with me at Nazareth, made
him a laughing offer, and he actually deserted me then
and there, and left me to starve on a frying-pan and an
Arab boy. I reformed him back in a twinkling after I
caught him, and I think there was a tear in his eye when
I parted from him at Beyrout.

But I linger too long in Cairo. My last piece of work
was to sit three mortal hours by a Jew money-changer,
who did ten pounds of gold into copper money for me,
which we carried, or a man for us, to the hotel, to furnish
small change on the upper river. This, and about
four times as much more, belonging to Abd-el-Atti, stood
on our boat in open baskets during our whole voyage—accessible
to any fingers, but always safe.

At four in the afternoon the last cart, car, van, break,
or whatever may be the proper name of the Egyptian
vehicle drawn by a single bullock, was at the door of the
Indian Hotel, where we had now been for six weeks. A
half dozen loads had previously gone down to Boulak to
the boat, and on this we piled our trunks and small articles,
and then surveyed our empty rooms with no regret.
We were glad to be away, although every hour had been
pleasantly employed, and a year would not suffice to show
the stranger all the graceful minarets, strange, quaint
lattices, exquisite arches, and lofty mosks of the city of
Salah-e'deen. But the Nile was forever flowing by, laden
with stories of Karnak, of Philæ, and of Abou Simbal,
and we grew anxious to be away on its waters.

The Phantom lay at the bank of the river in the rear
of the house of its owner. Passing through the house

by an arched passage and climbing down a filthy bank,
the rubbish-heap of the family, we reached the deck and
took possession of the vessel.

The “monarch of all I survey” idea was the prominent
one at first; but there was too much work on hand to
allow of its being enjoyed. Trunks, boxes, crates of
turkeys, coops of chickens, carpets, mats, oranges, fruits
of all kinds, guns, pistols, coats, shawls, and the hundred
et ceteras of a winter outfit lay in indescribable confusion
everywhere. Out of this chaos we proceeded to extract
order, and having at length accomplished our design in a
measure, we discharged our donkey-boys with the customary
bucksheesh, and wrapping around us our cloaks
and shawls, for the air was chilly as we came out of the
cabin, we went up on the cabin deck and ordered all
clear for the start.

I could for a moment fancy myself on the deck of the
old Phantom in western waters, but only for a moment.

“Are you all ready there?” That's the English of
my question, which in Arabic was a single interrogative
word, “Hadah?”

The answer was tolerably good English, if it was pure
Arabic—“Aiowah,” not unlike an American sailor's
“Aye, aye.” “Cast off then—go ahead Reis Hassanein.”

This last command, profane as it sounds, had no reference
to the Reis's visual organs. The order in Arabic is
“Godam Ya Reis Hassanein,” literally, “Forward, Captain
Hassanein.” We fired thirteen guns, and the Phantom
fell off on the current from the shadow of the houses
into the glorious moonlight on the Nile.

Never was such an hour for departure on the voyage.
The sky was fathomless in its deep blue beauty. The Nile
was yellow gold under us. Minaret and dome stood up
in the silent air, and shed a softer light than the moon's
own rays, while far away, solemn and majestic, the solemnity

that of immortality, the majesty that of centuries,
stood the pyramids of Ghizeh, gray and solemn in the
light of their old companion. How contemptuously the
moon and the pyramids looked down on us sexagenarians
of the nineteenth century after the coming of
our Lord! How swiftly the river rushed by us, on to
the sea that had received it for so many ages, heedless of
the passing travelers whose lives would be as brief as the
shadow of the sail passing between the moon and the
wave!

It was an hour for dreams, if dreaming were possible
where all that was real was dreamy—where the trees
were lofty palms, waving their crowns to and fro on the
starry sky—where the shores were the dust of dead Pharaohs
and the children of Jacob and Joseph—where the
buildings were domes and minarets, and over all the ancient
pyramids—where the stars, calm and steadfast, have
looked down on a hundred dynasties of kings, on the
graves of a score of nations—where Moses taught and
Plato learned, and where the infant eyes of the Son of
God looked up to His and our home.

I wrapped my Syrian cloak closely around me, for it
was cold at first, and sitting on the cabin deck watched
the curious operations of my new crew, and endeavored
for an hour to learn the philosophy of their ways of doing
things. But I was puzzled beyond endurance. When
they wished to turn the boat's head, they pulled precisely
the oar I should have let alone; and when they
wished to take the wind, they flattened the sail to it with
as sharp an edge as they could possibly manage. This was
the fashion with every thing, and so continued throughout
the voyage. The boat, in fact, managd itself sailed
and steered itself and did every thing but, make itself
fast and cast off. Indeed it did cast off once in a while,
and I woke to find her drifting quietly to a sand-bank

or a rock, while every man on the boat was sound
asleep.

An hour passed, and the wind had failed us. We lay
under the Ghizeh shore of the river, with lofty palms
over our heads, a boat with an English party on board
lying a hundred yards from us, and profound silence resting
on the river and shore. Even the soft ripple of the
river seemed but to make the silence audible, and no one
could imagine a city with two hundred thousand inhabitants
on the bank of the stream by our side.

This is a strange characteristic of Cairo in the night.
With the sunset every one goes home. Here and there
a lantern is visible in the evening, as some belated pedestrian
hurries along; but there are no street-lamps, no
windows to the houses shining out on the passers-by, no
sparkling shop-lamps, no shoppers, theatre-goers, diners-out,
or other late walkers along the highway; the city is
in profound darkness, and the river flows by as silent a
shore as where the desert comes down to it on east and
west in Nubia. The oldest Egyptian that lay in stone
sarcophagus, or painted mummy-box at Sakkara, slept
not more profoundly than I that first night on the river.

Like the music of a dream, like
the sounds one hears in waking
hours that are given to visions,
sweeter than the voices of birds,
far sweeter than sound of organ
in cathedral or choir, be it ever so
triumphant, came over the river, at
the break of day, the muezzin's call
to prayer. From the mosk of
Mohammed Ali, at the citadel, high up above all Cairo, it
came first. The Sultan Hassan took it up, and old Tooloon,
and far-off Ghalaoon and El-Azhar, and I even
heard, or thought I heard, the old man's voice who sings
to the sands of the desert that roll around the tomb of
Ghait Bey. It came swelling like the sound of a harp-string,
until the four hundred mosks of the City of
Saladin took it up, and it filled the charmed air with
sweet and holy melody. “Prayer is better than sleep—
awake and pray.”

It was not yet light, but the footsteps of the day were
in the east; and he came on, now with a faint gray light
over the Mokattam hills, now with a flush of crimson on
the white and gossamer-like minarets of the mosk of
Mohammed Ali, and now with the full burst of sunlight
on the valley of Memphis and On.

A light breeze now stole up the river, and we made
sail. Running slowly along on the west side of the island
of Rhoda, and passing the palace of Hassan Pasha
and the busy scene at the ferry of Old Cairo , we lost the
city, and were on the most lordly of rivers. We were
stopped by a hail from the shore, and on approaching
found a messenger from the government-office which had
sent us the carriage the day previous. It is worth relating,
as an illustration of the constant anxiety of this government
and its officials to please foreigners. We had
left in the carriage a small pasteboard almanac, value
three cents on the 1st of January, and much less now that
it was the middle of November. When the carriage was
cleaned in the morning it was found, and a cawass was instantly
dispatched after us with two horses and a government
drag.

He went to Boulak, and learned that we had sailed in
the evening. Then he went to Old Cairo , and crossed
the ferry to Ghizeh, where he learned that we had passed
early in the morning. Returning to the east bank, he
drove four miles up the river and overtook us as I have
related. We sent the small boat on shore for it, and
then squared away—if the word is allowable, with a
lateen sail—and the wind having now freshened, the
boat seemed verily as if she had wings, and flew on, the
water parting with a rush and ripple on each side of her
bow.

In the afternoon, we passed a boat lying at the shore,
and carrying an American flag. It was the boat of Rev.
Mr. Martin, one of the American missionaries at Cairo,
just starting on a voyage of inspection to determine
whether it was desirable to locate a mission at any point
up the river. We met them frequently, and had great
pleasure in their pleasant companionship.

The pyramids of Gizeh, of Saccara, and of Dashour,

appeared in succession as we approached them, and
watched our departure with changeless aspect; nor was
it till late in the afternoon that we lost sight of the lofty
citadel of Cairo and the white mosk that shines from it.

It was not to be supposed that we should find ourselves
entirely at home on our boat within the first twenty-four
hours, and yet I fancy that any one who saw us that day,
stretched on diwans, smoking our chibouks, and reading
or talking, would have imagined us old voyagers on the
return from a long journey; so perfect was every provision
for comfort and luxury. The hotel in Cairo was nothing
to it, though that was excellent.

The Nile itself, at first, sadly disappointed me. I confess
to ideas of a clear and glorious river, like the swift
Ohio, flowing over golden sand and shining stones. I
had never paused to ask myself whence came its fertilizing
powers, or whence the vast deposits of soft mud that
enrich the lower part of Egypt; and when I saw the
strong stream in the hot sunshine, looking more like flowing
mud than water, I was unwilling to call this the Nile.
Utility was not what I wanted to see in the river. Beauty,
majesty, power, all these I had looked for, and there was
nothing of them until the sun went down, and the moon
gilded—not silvered—the stream. Then it was the river
of my imagination—a strong, a mighty flood, glorious in
its deep, strong flow, and the unsightly banks, which, in
the day, are abrupt walls of black mud, in layers, looking
like huge unbaked brick, become picturesque and fairly
beautiful with waving groves of sont and palms, and glistening
fields of doura.

We were all awake before the sun rose next morning,
and saw him come up after the short morning twilight,
which is beautiful beyond words. The sharp outlines of
the hills, in morning and evening twilight, surpass belief.

Before the sun was above the mountains, Trumbull and

myself were off on the plain, shooting partridges, for the
wind was gone and the boat was lying at the bank. In
half an hour Ferraj came off to us with cups of hot coffee,
exquisitely made, for therein Hajji Mohammed did excel,
and having taken these, gun in hand, we strolled up the
river, and the Phantom followed us before a light northern
breeze. As this increased she picked us up, and we
ran on with the lofty sail swinging in the strong, full
breeze, and pulling her by the nose through the rushing
current of the river.

We reached Benisoef at noon on the third day, and while
strolling through the narrow bazaars, with their cupboard
shops, I was not a little amused at the dragoman's method
of treating his countrymen. Travelers should take a native
dragoman in preference to a Maltese on this account,
that the inhabitants have no fear of a Maltese before their
eyes, and insult travelers without hesitation and without
being punished, when they are attended by a foreigner.

But the presence of a native dragoman does not always
protect from insulting language.

I did not, but Abd-el-Atti did, overhear a remark made
by one of three men seated in a shop front, somewhat
derogatory to the character of Christians in general, with
particular reference to me. He wheeled in an instant,
but the Arab was too quick for him, and vanished around
a corner, leaving his shoes on the ground in front of the
shop, and his two companions sitting within it. With one
of the shoes Abd-el-Atti beat one of the scoundrels, and
with the other shoe he thrashed the other, finishing each
castigation by throwing the shoe into the face of the victim,
adding a little advice to keep better company. Abd-el-Atti
was by no means satisfied with the escape of the
chief offender, and ten minutes afterward, as we returned
that way, proposed to surround him. It was probable he
had by this time returned to talk over the affair with his

friends. Abd-el-Atti walked on unobserved, and having
passed the shop, gave me a signal. We closed up, and
he sprang like a cat on his prey.

Never was man more astounded. Abd-el-Atti had
snatched a stick from a by-stander, and showered blows
on the back and head of the offender, until he made a
sudden bolt to escape, and, in his intense haste, stumbled
over a boy, and went six feet into the dirt, taking a piece
of skin off from his nose—quite large enough to keep him
employed in better business for some days, than insulting
travelers. Fifty turbaned shop-keepers looked on all this
with motionless countenances, neither approving nor
disapproving, by word or gesture, though I thought I could
detect a smile of satisfaction in some of their dark eyes as
he bit the dust.

We left Benisoef with a rattling breeze, but it failed
us toward evening, and a dead calm followed. In the
morning I went ashore, on the eastern side, to look for
game, and found myself on a large island several miles
in extent. A native, at work in the fields, assured me
that I should find wild hogs in the thickets back of the
doura fields, and signaling the boat for two sailors to
help me, I went into it with the determination to have
them out if they were there.

It was a warm day, but the air was clear and rich, like
wine to the lungs, and I scarcely felt any fatigue after a
five-mile walk at a fast rate.

Here, I found a thicket that had all the appearance of
being a fit place for the game I was after. I had no
knowledge whatever of the animal's habits; had never
shot one in my life, but I guessed at his taste from his
cousins in America, and plunged into the mud swamp
with full expectation of seeing my game before me.

Nor was I disappointed. I had not advanced ten rods,
when one-eyed Mustapha shouted furiously, and a small,

dark pig dashed through the thicket, close to Abdallah's
feet. I shot. Abdallah threw himself on him,
they rolled and floundered together in the mud ten seconds,
and then—presto—the pig was gone, and Abdallah
nearly gone. Never was poor devil so muddy. He was
a mass of mud. His hair was mortar. His nose was
stopped. His mouth was full of his native earth, and his
clothes—he had but one shirt, and that could not be
harmed or dirtied.

I saw no more pigs or hogs, or tracks of any sort. I
shot four rabbits, four partridges, a dozen and a half
pigeons, and shot at a curlew that I didn't hit; and have
always been sorry since that I missed, as he was different
from any other that I have ever seen. I returned to the
river four miles above where I left it. The boat was
slowly approaching, and I sat down to rest while the
men tracked her up. From this time till we reached Es
Souan, nearly thirty days afterward, we continued most
of the time to track.

The Nile has along each bank a tow-path as well
beaten as that of a canal in America. At times, when
there are sand-banks near one shore, the boat is rowed
across, and the men resume their tracking on the opposite
bank. The speed made depends of course on the
velocity of the current against which they are pulling,
and varies from eight to twelve miles a day with a boat
as large as ours.

On the next evening we were at the little village of
Abou-Girg, on the west bank; and as Abd-el-Atti was
going into the village for milk, I accompanied him. The
low water would not, allow the boat to reach the bank,
and we had directed her to anchor in the middle of the
river, as well for the sake of avoiding thieves as for convenience.
Nor could the small boat reach the shore;
and having pulled up in the mud, I mounted the shoulders

of an Arab sailor, who carried me safely to dry
land.

The mud village was as quiet as a grave-yard in the
moonlight until we approached, and then fifty dogs made
the night hideous with cowardly barking. Milk is not as
easily procured as might be imagined in a country where
cattle, goats, and camels are plenty. Butter brings them
so much better prices, that few are willing to sell milk;
and hence the propriety of applying to a man in authority
to compel the production of the article we wished. I had
been furnished with all the necessary authority for this
purpose, having with my firman a sort of roving letter of
credit from the government, directed to all sheiks of villages,
and officials, great and small, requiring them, at all
times, to give me whatever I wished, in the way of provisions,
at government prices.

It was a mud village, and the streets were but narrow
alleys between the walls of the low, windowless houses,
whose roofs were corn-stalks or palm-branches. The
moon shone very quietly down in those streets. I had
never seen it more so. There was an aspect of repose
about it that I could account for only in one way, and
that was by supposing that the rays of light, having fallen
into this vile and dirty spot, had lain down there in the
repose of absolute despair.

“Where is the sheik?” we demanded of a naked boy
who made himself visible in the moonlight an instant.
But he vanished with a howl of terror, and made no reply.
We met a woman face to face, as she came around
a corner, carrying a calabash on her head. She stopped,
drew her dress around her face, set down her calabash on
the ground, never removing the gaze of her eyes from
my face, and then wheeled, and darted away.

At length we caught a man, and he took us up a street
to a point where it made a short angle to the left for

thirty feet, and then continued its course. The moon
shone up it, but this angle was in the shade; and on a
diwan made of dried mud, the customary bench in all the
Egyptian villages, sat the sheik and a half dozen of his
friends in the shade, with their backs to the moon, looking
up the street, where it shone clearly again. Our errand
was soon stated, and the pail, which one of the sailors
had brought; was placed on the broad bench in front
of the sheik, while I sat on one side of it, Abd-el-Atti
stood on the other, and a dozen men, women, and boys
sat down in the dusty street, just within the line of
shadow.

The old sheik puffed his pipe in silence a moment, then
handed it to me. One soon forgets prejudices. It would
be some time before I could be induced at home to take
a pipe from the lips of a white or black man; but I had
not been in Egypt a month before I had learned that my
Nubian servant always brought me my pipe between his
own large lips, and I had accepted the hospitality and
wet mouth-pieces of a dozen Turks and Arabs. I did
manage at first to get a sly wipe over the mouth-piece
with my thumb as I took it; but I gave up this notion at
length, and therefore I took the sheik's chibouk unhesitatingly,
and puffed as contentedly as his vile Beledi tobacco
would permit, while he summoned up his followers.
“Hassan! Hassan! Hassan!” The village rang with the
voice. No house was there that did not hear it. But
Hassan did not appear. Hassan was wide awake. All the
village knew that we wanted milk, and Hassan, for the
first time in his worthless life, was away from home.

“Some one bring Hassan!” growled the sheik; and
while some one was about it, he shouted for “Mohammed.”
Mohammed was on hand. He had no milk, and
was safe in appearing, while they endeavored to convince
him that he had a gallon of it. Hassan was brought into

the ring, and the sheik ordered him to bring the desired
article. Hassan swore he had no milk. He did not know
what milk was. If you would believe him, he never drew
milk from his mother's breast; and, in fact, on looking at
the intense darkness of his countenance, it seemed probable
that he was right. He was innocent of the article.

But the sheik knew Hassan. A storm of words commenced
that resounded through the village, and Hassan
departed growling. The moonlight fell quietly in the
narrow street, and the group, which had steadily increased
in number, sat in the edge of the light, striving
in vain to pierce the darkness that enveloped my corner,
and catch a sight of my countenance. The sheik was
silent, and I followed his example, puffing industriously
at his vile chibouk, which I twice handed back to him
with my hand on my forehead, and which he as often returned
to me wet from his lips, with his hand most impressively
plunged into his loose robe, in the region where
ordinary humanity carries its heart, but where an Egyptian
carries either a stone or nothing.

It was not so much the mouth-piece as the tobacco
to which I objected; but I resigned myself to it after
fruitless efforts to get rid of it, and kept at it with commendable
perseverance, until I discovered a sleepy-looking
Arab on the other side of the sheik, who looked as if
he would be glad of a chance at it, and I passed it to him.
He seized it and made fast to it, while I yielded myself to
a profound sense of satisfaction, and, leaning back, looked
up toward the stars. I say toward the stars, but not at
them, for not less than twenty heads intercepted my
vision. The roofs of the houses were crowded with
women, who were looking over into the open space below
to see the stranger. I stared at them unobserved, and,
though they were villagers living in mud huts and clothed
in blue cotton, still they had as beautiful faces among them

as I have seen in splendid halls, and eyes that outshone
the stars themselves. Ah, those lustrous eyes of the
Arab women! one can not imagine the possibility of all
the extravagances of the Arabian Nights until he has
seen their depths of beauty, and then he understands it
all. The dark lines of kohl, drawn around the edges of
the lids, make them appear like diamonds set in ebony,
and their laughing expression is the soul of fun and delight.

I asked the sheik what fruit grew on the house-tops in
Abou-Girg? Every head was raised instantly, and the
eyes disappeared in a twinkling, while a hearty laugh ran
around the circle. At this moment Hassan made his appearance
with a bowl containing less than a pint of milk,
which he poured into the pail in front of the sheik. Then
came a tempest. The sheik groaned, and Abd-el-Atti
waxed eloquent. Hassan was overpowered with the
storm of words that ensued, and departed to squeeze his
calabash or his cows for a little more. Meantime Mohammed
had been dispatched to raise some milk under penalty
of a thrashing if he failed; and when he was gone,
the sheik shouted for female assistance: “Serreeyeh!
Serreeyeh!”

She came, wearing the invariable blue cloth wound
around her body, head, and face, the eyes alone being
visible, and was dispatched on the same errand, while the
sheik asked news from the war, and we launched into the
sea of politics. The scene was enlivened by the arrival
of an Arab mounted on a white horse, and a half dozen
tall fellows in red tarbouches, who had been sent for to sit
on shore all night and watch our boat. Every village is
responsible for the safety of a boat lying over night at or
near its banks, and, if robbery occurs, must make good
all losses.

At length Hassan returned with another pint of milk,

and poured it into the pail with an air of satisfaction that
seemed to claim the approval of his neighbors. The
sheik looked in, took up the pail, shook it, looked at
Hassan, and set it down with a groan of disgust that was
irresistible. I think Hassan's chances for a well pair of
feet were poorer at that moment than they had been in
some weeks. But Mohammed arrived in the nick of time
with a good supply, and filled the pail. As for Serreeyeh,
Serreeyeh is doubtless looking for it yet, for we saw no
more of her. I took my leave of the sheik and went
back to the Phantom, followed by the guard, who spread
their mats on the bank while I pulled off to the boat,
which was anchored fifty yards from the shore. For an
hour the men on board exchanged hails every ten minutes
with the guard on shore; after that our hails were
unanswered, and from the appearance of the three mats
and six dark spots on them, I was convinced that they
were keeping watch after the most approved Turkish
fashion.

The next day we tracked again all day. But there was
nothing tedious in this way of progressing, for it gave us
an opportunity of going on shore and walking, shooting,
gathering shells, agates, and cornelians, or meeting the
natives and talking with or looking at them.

We strolled along a sandy beach, the ladies looking for
specimens of the Nile shells, and J — and myself carrying
our guns and shooting an occasional plover or pigeon.
We came to a point on the east bank not far below the
village of Sheik Hassan, where the desert came down to
the edge of the river, and from the Nile to the Red Sea
the sand rolled everywhere. There was a rocky point
projecting into the river, and on its top the remains of a
foundation hewn in it. Nothing but these lines was
there. No fallen wall, no blocks of stone, no column,
only the trench in the solid rock that marked the outline

of the building which had once stood there. There was
nothing strange in this, for almost every rock from Cairo
to Wâdy Halfeh has interesting memorials about it; but
no American, accustomed as we are to the modern, can
look on the foundation-wall of a building of three thousand
years ago without pausing to analyze the new
thoughts and emotions that crowd into his brain. Possibly
our monuments are older. Perhaps the mounds that
I opened on the banks of the Ohio may be the graves of a
race that had grown old when Egypt was young—of a
people whose monarchs were mighty men of renown long
centuries before the valley of the Nile rang to the sounds
of war under the Shepherd Kings. I have looked on
those mounds with reverence, but reverence more for the
mysterious and unknown than for the ancient and great.
I have slept in solemn nights, when the wind was wailing
through the forest, wrapped in my blanket, in the turf
inclosure that contained one of those strange heaps, and
every night ghostly visitors surrounded me, giant men,
like trees walking, and with voices like the wind. But I
never felt in those dark communions with the unknown
past any of that profound awe with which I stand among
the relics of a nation whose history I know, and whose
age is recorded on granite.

It was but a line on the stone, but it told of the days
of princes and kings. We sat down on the rock,
Miriam and I, and the sun shone pleasantly down on us,
and the river passed on at our feet as we read the story.
It was of kingly footsteps on the floor, of the light tread
of the fairy feet of princesses, of the tramp of men-at-arms,
the sound of music, and laughter, and song, and
dance, and revel. Soft passages were not wanting, that
told of pure and gentle love; and those we paused to
read, for human love hallows the earth more than any
other incident in all the life of man. I care not where it is

—though in the hut of an Egyptian Fellah or the hovel
of a miserable Berber, if the sanctifying influence of love
have been there, it has made it a sacred place. And the
thought that arms had been twined around each other
here, that lips had wooed each other's kisses here, that
hearts had beaten against hearts, and strong embraces
held young beauties, and voices whispered low soft words
of human fondness, and eyes looked love here—this
thought hallowed the rock, though arms, lips, and young
beauties were all dead dust a thousand years ago—dead
dust carried away on the river to the sea, and by the sea
scattered to the islands and continents of an unknown
world. If all the dust of all the earth could but start
into life and clear perception for an instant where it now
lies, what strange, wild countenances of affright and horror
would men see staring on them from the earth beneath
their feet in every land!

We reached Kalouseneh that day. When within four
miles of it, I left the boat, and crossed the country on
foot, gun in hand, shooting along the way.

At the village I found it market-day. There are about
a hundred acres of palm-grove here—it might almost be
called a forest—and in the shade sat literally hundreds of
men, women, and children, with their various wares and
merchandise. All the fruits, grains, and products of the
country abounded, and there were long rows of temporary
shops, consisting only of shawls spread on the ground,
covered with beads and other trinkets, to tempt the
Bedouin or Egyptian women. I sat down under a palm,
tired out, and endeavored to cool and rest myself; but a
gaping crowd, scores and scores of the people, surrounded
me, stifling the air, and nearly suffocating me. I left the
market and entered the village. It was the usual mud
structure of Egypt, and but for the beauty of its palm-grove,
would have been as detestable as any other. I
found a coffee-house on the bank of the river, where I
sat down to wait the coming of my boat. It was already
occupied, but they vacated the coolest diwan on my arrival,
and I took it.

Do not imagine a coffee-house on the European or
American plan. Far from it. A mud wall in the rear,

seven feet high, and two posts at the front corners, supported
a roof of reeds or of corn-stalks. This is the
Egyptian coffee-shop, found in every village of any size,
and furnishing coffee at ten paras the cup, araka at a little
more, and boosa at five paras for enough to get sick upon.
Forever be the memory of Egyptian boosa detested! It
was here that I first encountered it, and, unsuspicious
man that I was, invested my paras—five of them constituting
almost the smallest coin known in Egypt—in ordering
a cup of beer—Arabic, boosa. It came, and I looked at it,
and elevated my gaze to the faces of the group around
me. They did not understand my horror, except only a
ghawazee, a dancing-girl, whose intense black eyes flashed
her fun as she saw me posed by the earthen dish full of a
vile abomination that—on my faith it did—smelled as if
it had already served the purposes of two Arabs, and
refused to stay on their stomachs. I tasted it. I taste
every thing, clean or unclean, that Arabs taste. No, I
am wrong: there is a dish that Abdul Rahman Effendi,
the governor of Nubia from Es Souan to Wâdy Halfeh,
called my attention to, and which I did not taste.
It was the entrails of a sheep, chopped fine, with the
gall broken and sprinkled on them, which a half dozen
Berbers were eating raw, with a gusto that might
have tempted a less fastidious man; as I said, I did
not taste that. But I did taste the boosa, and I handed
back the dish, cup, bowl, whatever its name was—it
held a quart—and I begged the proprietor of the shop,
as a special favor to me, to pour it all back into his
reservoir, and shut the cover down. I shudder as I remember
it now!

I sat for two hours in the coffee-shop, and I am sorry
to say that my company was none of the most reputable.
There were three filthy-looking Arabs, half-civilized Bedouins,
belonging to a tribe that Mohammed Ali persuaded

to occupy arable land and raise camels for his
uses, and whom Said Pasha has converted into enemies
by attempting to tax. There was a great rascal, in the
shape of an owner of a boat, who was endeavoring to
extract a sum of money out of a poor reis by a summary
process, not unlike some attempts that I have seen
in other countries, in which attempt there were some ten
or twelve villagers deeply interested, while two ghawazee
—dancing girls—dressed in the voluptuous, half-naked
style of their profession, swindled the various parties out
of successive cups of coffee, or the money to buy them,
by the same arts that women of their character practice
all the world over.

The dispute about the boat, between the owner and the
reis, grew furious. All shouted at once, and now I
learned that the sheik of the reises was present endeavoring
to settle the difficulty.

This is a feature of Egyptian government. Every trade
or business has its sheik. In Cairo you will hear constantly
of the sheik of the donkey-owners, and, on any
dispute arising among your boys as to the division of the
day's pay, you had nothing to do but to throw down your
money, and let them go to their sheik and settle it.

Achmet, the boat owner, had contracted with Reis
Barikat to let him his boat for a year at a fixed rate per
month, and he had had it a year and a half, and paid
regularly. Just at this time freights were very high, and
the boat was loaded with grain, and ready to go down
the river, when the rascally Achmet demanded the boat,
on the ground that his contract was for a year and no
longer, and although it ran on six months longer, that
was no reason why it should six months more.

The dispute waxed furious, and came at last to the
true western style.

“You lie.”

“You lie yourself.”

And then they went at each other. Loud shouts
arose on all sides, and the ghawazee danced in uproarious
fun at the idea of a fight, and ran up to me with the
most decided indications of their intent to embrace me
as they had embraced every body else.

I was sitting on a bench of mud a little elevated from
the mud floor of the coffee-shop. I drew my feet up
under me, and felt for the handle of a friend in my
shawl-belt as the roaring, screaming mass came over toward
me, and just then Abd-el-Atti made his appearance
with koorbash in hand. A koorbash is Arabic for cowhide,
the cow being a rhinoceros. It is the most cruel
whip known to fame. Heavy as lead, and flexible as India
rubber, usually about forty inches long and tapering
gradually from an inch in diameter to a point, it administers
a blow which leaves its mark for time.

I had not been on the Nile a week before I learned
that the koorbash was the only weapon of defense necessary
to carry, and we soon gave up knives and pistols
and took to the whip, of which all the people had a salutary
horror.

Abd-el-Atti made the crowd fly as he swung his weapon
among them, and silence ensued with astonishing suddenness.

“How dare you make such a row in the presence of
Braheem Effendi?”

“Who is Braheem Effendi?” asked the reis of the
boatmen, for up to this moment he had not observed
that the stranger in the coffee-shop was a Howajji.
This was owing not to my oriental appearance so much
as to the extremely shabby costume that I happened to
have on that morning.

“Yonder he is.”

The reis advanced immediately to pay his respects

and apologise for the row. I had to be frank and tell
him it needed an apology. Then he stated the difficulty,
and Achmet interrupted him, and Reis Barikat sat silent
on the ground just outside the shade of the coffee-shop,
sullen as if he expected, as a matter of course, that, now
that his affair was referred to a rich man and his turgoman,
the decision would be against him, a poor devil
without friends, right or wrong.

Abd-el-Atti interpreted rapidly and fluently, much to
my admiration, and when I expressed surprise that any
doubt could arise on so clear a case as this, and asked if
they had no law to punish the man who had sat, day after
day, on the bank and seen his boat loaded while he
waited for the opportunity to attempt extortion like
this, old Reis Barikat looked over his shoulder at me in
astonishment gradually changing into delight, and then
I proceeded to deliver a lecture on the doctrine of bailments,
contracts, executory and executed, and all the
law that could be applied remotely or nearly to this case,
or any case like it. The crowd around the coffee-house increased
to not less than a hundred persons, all profoundly
silent, while I amused myself by watching their dark
faces, among which the bright countenance of one of the
ghawazee girls, white as a Circassian's, and rosy as a
Georgian's, shone conspicuous with delight, for she had
all along favored the old reis, who had, doubtless,
given her a free sail down to Cairo once in a while.

The scene was worth remembering. I sat on the
bench, over which a straw mat, crowded with fleas, had
been spread. Abd-el-Atti stood before me. The sheik
of the boatmen sat on the ground in front, Achmet by
his side, and the villagers stood crowded behind them.
By the time I had finished my address the Phantom was
in sight, and rising from the seat of justice, I gathered
my robes about me with as much dignity as might be,

and quietly walked down to the boat, leaving the reis
and Achmet to the tender mercies of the sheik enlightened
by American law.

Abd-el-Atti remained behind, and informed me that
the sheik's decision was based on the profound views
that I had suggested, although, to say truth, he didn't
remember the precise order of them or what they were
about. But he gave Reis Barikat the boat on the same
terms for the voyage as before, and administered justice
to the feet of the extortionate owner.

While we were lying here, I saw a woman sitting on
the bank tearing sugar-cane to pieces with her teeth, and
feeding it to her child. The mother's beauty of teeth attracted
my attention, and I approached her to look at
them. Her head-dress was of the shape common in her
country, consisting, as I supposed, of round pieces of
brass attached to each other. Her form was not ungraceful,
and most liberally exposed by the single blue
shirt, open to the waist, which alone covered it. Abd-el-Atti
asked her something about her head-dress, and
told her he would give her five paras apiece for the ornaments.
I looked at him in surprise, and told him he was
making her a large offer.

“Do you think so? Look at them,” said he—and I
walked up and took hold of them. They were gold
pieces, Constantinople money, worth twenty odd piastres
each, and the woman had on her head actually more than
a hundred dollars' worth of gold coin. This style of headdress
is everywhere common. Women wear all they possess
on their heads, and nearly every coin in circulation
in Egypt has a hole in it, showing that it has been used
for this purpose. The young children of the poorer
classes wear the base metal coins of the value of a half
piastre and upward, and it is an evidence of the general
honesty of the people, that young children of five and ten

years old are seen everywhere with head-dresses covered
with these coins.

It was not yet evening, but there was no other village
for some distance above, and we thought it best to pass
the night here. Accordingly we laid the boat up at the
bank, and spread our carpets under the palm-trees. Here
we sat till the sun went down, and the moonlight came
gloriously over us. Never was there such a moon, never
such skies, never such stars as these. And when the
night comes, and I sit in the holy light that sanctifies
even this apparently God-forgotten land, I think there
can be no life in all the world like this. Palm-trees,
moonlight, and the Nile! What more? Sometimes—
sometimes, I say—not often—on such nights as these, I
remember a distant land of cold storms and biting frosts.
Often—how often! how earnestly, how fondly, I remember
a land of gleaming firesides and beloved faces; and I
see, the sad countenances of two who look for my coming,
and then I long to be away. God keep us all to meet in
a land that I love better than Jerusalem itself, for all my
darling memories of childhood and of you!

At break of day we glided away from the shadow of
the palm-trees, and pursued our course slowly up the
river—I, as usual, taking my gun and one of the men
with me, and walking on shore, in advance of the crew
who were at the tracking-rope. The current was strong,
and we had not advanced far when we met a boat in
which were a man, his wife, and two boys coming down
on the stream. It was heavily loaded and near the
shore, and the man was unable to row off and give our
boat the track, as was our right. It was manifest that
unless he stopped her we should be afoul, and that with
force enough to sink one or the other, or both. The usual
Arab shouting commenced, and the eldest boy plunged
into the stream with a rope for the shore. He reached

it, but the current swept him by the steep bank. I gave
him the end of my gun, and my man caught the rope,
and between us we swung the boat in to the shore. At
the moment that her bow struck, the other boy jumped
for the shore, and missing his footing, fell into the stream
just in time for the boat to close over him and absolutely
extinguish him. I thought he was done for. But Mohammed
sprang to the rescue, pushed off the boat, and
seized him literally in extremis.

All Arabs, men and boys, have their heads shaved,
leaving only a scalp-lock, said by some to be left in imitation
of the Prophet, who wore his own thus; and by
others said to be for the convenience of the angel who
will pull them out of their graves when the day of rising
shall come. The tuft of hair served the boy's purposes
at an earlier date than had been anticipated. Mohammed
lifted him bodily by it, his feet and hands spread
out like a frog. I thought his scalp must be pulled off;
but no. He picked himself up from the mud into which
Mohammed threw him, and stood, without a whimper, an
unconcerned spectator of the scene which followed. His
father was indignant at Mohammed for saving the boy's
life so rudely. He should have been more polite about
it. The old man struck a good blow, but got a better
one in return. By this time the crew had come up with
the tracking-rope, and some natives had run down to the
shore. The mêlée became general. I was the only one
not in it, and I amused myself with seeing their harmless
blows, which were showered furiously on each other,
while the shouts were hideous. Blows and shouts at
length became milder, and the difficulty was ended. The
crew resumed their tracking-rope, turning occasionally to
hurl a general volley—sort of company-fire of words—
in the rear, until Reis Hassanein, who had been foremost

in the fray, resumed his walk by the side of his men, and
gave the time for the invariable towing chorus—
which they continued right cheerily until afternoon, when
we were under the Jebel e' Tayr, or “Mountain of
Birds,” which, saith tradition, the birds annually visit
for the purpose of leaving one of their number imprisoned
until their next return. The why and the
wherefore who knoweth?

But the mountain is better known as the site of the
“Convent of the Pulley,” or of “Sitteh Mariam el
Adra” (our Lady Mary the Virgin), and, more briefly,
“Dayr el Adra.” It is a long range of cliffs, singularly
broken, and full of rifts and chasms, rising perpendicularly
from the east side of the river for four miles. The
convent, which is in fact but a Coptic village within mud-brick
walls, occupies the highest part of it, and access to
it is had by a well-hole, a natural break in the rock, up
which men may climb from the river's edge. Otherwise
one must go some miles around to reach it.

Coptic convents are not such places as we are accustomed
to imagine convents. Marriage not being forbidden
to the priests, their wives and families necessarily
form part of the inhabitants of a convent, which thus becomes
a village, often of no small dimensions. A church,
surrounded by mud huts, and all inclosed in a wall to
protect them from the incursions of Bedouins, who have
no fear of the church before their eyes, composes the
residence of the monks. They live as they best can—by
begging, cultivating land, and possibly in less honest
ways. I have not much admiration for the Copts. A
Mussulman is worth a dozen of them, and a much safer
companion. The Dayr el Adra boasts a church built by

the Empress Helena, but it is nearly in ruins, and there
is nothing interesting outside of it.

Long before we were up with it, two black heads were
visible on the surface of the water under the hill, and
two of the monks came off to the boat, swimming more
than two miles to meet us. Their robes were not according
to any monastic order that I have before heard of,
nor could any opinion be formed from them of the rank
of the individuals. In point of fact, the only opinion one
could form was of their physical developments, and these
were magnificent. They were naked, and two more
stout, brawny, heavily-built specimens of humanity were
never seen in or out of a monastery. They made the air
ring and the cliffs echo their shouts from the time they
took to the water until they reached us, “Howajji, Christiano;
Christiano, Howajji,” and would doubtless have
added the demand for bucksheesh in the approved Egyptian
style if I had not anticipated them. I was on the
upper deck sketching the hill, and when they were within
two hundred yards of us, rapidly approaching, throwing
their long arms out of the water and drawing themselves
along, I called to them to give me bucksheesh. I
begged more vociferously than an Arab—I shouted, I
howled it out: “Edine Bucksheesh, Edine Bucksheesh,
Khamsa, Ashera, Bucksheesh, Bucksheesh!”

They were taken aback. It was not what they came
for. I had mistaken them. It was they who wanted
money. They had not come on a benevolent mission to
the travelers' boat; so they dropped astern very quietly
and swam ashore on the west bank, along which we were
tracking, where they held a small council and took each
other's advice according to priestly rule. It appeared to
be a new question in their experience. For something
like a thousand years the monks of the monastery of the
Sitteh Mariam had been accustomed to ask gifts from

passing travelers, but never before had one demanded
aid from the convent; and yet it looked proper; even
their thick skulls felt the penetrating power of the idea.

Five minutes closed the council, and they advanced
along the sand to the side of the boat.

“Howajji,” commenced the leader. I have an idea
that he was the father abbot; he was six feet in—no—
not in his stockings. His tone was subdued. It was by
way of introducing a conversation that he called our attention.
I was busy over my sketch with my head bent
down, though I watched him steadily.

“Howajji.”

“Howajji mafish,” replied Trumbull. “There's no
Howajji here. What do you mean by calling me a shopkeeper?”

Again he paused to consider. There was a point in
the remark. The term Howajji, or Howaggi, as it is pronounced
in Egypt, is applied indiscriminately to all travelers,
originally as an expression of contempt, though
it has become the common phrase for a foreigner who
travels for pleasure. The Turks consider all other nations
mere shopkeepers, but the Christian monk had no
excuse for using the word. At length he began again.

“Sidi” (gentleman), and proceeded to state his case.
It was a somewhat unecclesiastical affair altogether, but
I think he did not appreciate that. When he had explained
his wishes, which resolved themselves into the
usual demand for charity, only it was somewhat novel to
hear it asked in the name of the Saviour, we invited the
monks alongside. They swam off to the boat and held
on to the rail, with their mouths open and heads thrown
back, and we administered the silver in due form, laying
it on their tongues. But the ceremony was incomplete,
and the next instant they shouted for “wine, wine,” with
mouths yet wider open. This exhausted our respect for

the church, and I swung a whip over their heads so suddenly
that they disappeared like divers, and swam ashore
again. They walked by our side three miles or so up the
river, and then took to the water again, and swam across
to the convent, where, I trust, for the benefit of future
travelers, they referred the question I had suggested to a
chapter of the worthy brethren of the Dayr el Adra—a
forlorn hope verily.

In the afternoon, while I was away shooting geese, one
of the men cut his hand badly, and I found on my return
that Miriam had bound it up skillfully, and it was doing
well. But he insisted on my examining it, and I did so.
Every man on the boat thereupon presented himself with
a wound, bruise, or sore of some sort to be attended to,
excepting one only, who, after diligent search over his
body, could find nothing but an ancient wart on his finger
that he begged to have removed.

Medical advice and medicine are the most frequent demands,
next to the invariable bucksheesh, which we have
to reply to, not alone from our men, but from men along
shore. Women bring their children with sore eyes and
bruised bodies, and beg medicine, advice, and bucksheesh.

In the evening the deck of the boat presented a scene
that I much wished to have before me for preservation
on canvas. Reis Hassanein had an old uncle who came
with us from Cairo, by permission, as far as Manfaloot,
where he resides. He was an ancient reis himself, having
navigated the Nile for fifty years, and was fifty times
the man that his nephew was. All the evening he was
sitting on one side of a lantern, while Abd-el-Atti read
aloud to him from a ponderous volume of the Arabian
Nights, and the old man's face would light up with a glow
that was positively fine, as some passages of special beauty
or spirit struck his ear. Abd-el-Atti read well, and his
volume of the Arabian Nights proved a valuable addition

to our library. Thereby hangs a story, too, which is
worth the telling, as illustrating the manner in which
things are sometimes done in the East.

Mohammed Ali, among his other good deeds, published
a large number of books at the government press in
Boulak, and among other books he printed an edition of
the Arabian Nights, and another of geometry, both
large books, the former in two volumes. But who in
Egypt could be found to purchase books? The edition
lay unused, unsold, and unread, till the government
issued an order requiring every person in their employ
to take five or more copies of each. A capital way of
disseminating information this. Some hundreds of men
who could not read a letter were thus supplied with several
copies of valuable books. The result was that they
were glad to sell them for whatever they could get, and
for a while books were cheap in Cairo.

“Braheem Effendi,” said Reis Hassanein, as we left
Minieh, after examining the sugar factories there and
tasting Said Pasha's rum which he distills “in spite of
Mohammed's law.” The effendi was in his usual place
with his chibouk, on the larboard side of the cabin deck,
and acknowledged the low voice of the reis by a look.

“The wely yonder, under the fig-trees, is death to
crocodiles.”

It was a Moslem tomb standing on the river bank in
the village of Minieh.

“Why so?”

“Inshallah! They never pass it. If they do they turn
wrong side up and float down dead.”

Such is the story. Certain it is that the first crocodile
I shot at going up was a little way above here and the last
one coming down was near the same place.

The river now began to grow more interesting. The
hills on either side were more or less pierced with tombs,
and early the next morning we were abreast of Beni
Hassan, one of the most interesting points on the Nile.
But a breeze from the north is never to be thrown away,
and we did not stop now even to see the reputed tomb
of Joseph.

At evening, under the foot of a lofty bluff we passed a

small Moslem wely, or saint's tomb, with a white dome
over it, known as that of Sheik Said. A superstition of
the river leads all sailors passing this to throw into the
water some bread for the birds, of which there are hundreds
here. They are a common white gull, called by
the sailors Abou Nouris, and are said to inhabit the
tomb. No boat refusing the gift of bread can hope for a
safe passage. The birds swooped down in clouds to pick
up the floating pieces, and we saw the ceremony repeated
by four boats in succession descending the river as we
went up.

Reis Hassanein had a new passenger on deck that morning.
It appeared that while we were lying up in the
night a downward going boat had stopped near us and
proved to be in command of Hassanein's father, and to
have his own little daughter on board, going down to see
her father in Cairo. He took her out and was now conveying
her back to Manfaloot, her and his home; that is to
say as much his home as any place, for these Nile reises
are roving people and have wives and families, sailor
fashion, in every port. The fact was that his Manfaloot
wife became uneasy at his absence of more than a year,
and had packed off this child to hunt him up.

Hassanein applied, for permission to remain in Manfaloot
over one night. I warned him that I didn't like
this sort of thing, a wife sending a child to look after her
father's habits and haunts, and that he must look out for
squalls at Manfaloot. But the misguided wretch insisted
on his desires, and after due consultation Trumbull and
myself agreed to leave him to his fate, and promised to
stop at Manfaloot for a night.

Next day we passed the cliffs of Aboufayda, celebrated
for wild and furious tempests, but we found them calm,
and went ingloriously by at the end of a tow rope.

Trumbull and myself went ashore in the afternoon, and

walked some miles along the foot of the cliffs, examining
empty tombs with which the hills were honey-combed.
Bones and mummy cloths abounded. The dead had been
here, but were gone on the winds. I climbed one hill
two or three hundred feet, and looked into innumerable
tombs on terraces, but found nothing. I found one narrow
cavernous entrance which penetrated far into the
hill. I had not then adopted a plan I learned soon, never
to be without a candle in my pocket. I went in two hundred
feet by the light of successive pieces of paper, and
then my supply was exhausted, and I was obliged to retire.
I have little doubt that an exploration of this cavern
would repay well. It is not mentioned in any of the
books. It was about three feet wide by an average of
six high, and seemed to have been worked in the rock.
A little way above this we passed a great collection of
modern Christian graves in a ravine that came down to
the river, and which I suppose to be near the village Ebras.

Descending from a hillside where I had been in tomb
after tomb, I found myself almost literally on the top of
the wely of Sheik Abou Meshalk (Father of the Torch),
wherein for nearly or quite a hundred years one man
lived and grew old and fat on the bucksheesh of passing
boatman. He always left a light burning in the dome
or wely, and however fierce were the winds around Aboufayda,
the sailor was secure who caught sight of the
steady gleam of Abou Meshalk.

The old man died about six years ago, and his grandson,
a brawny Arab, has succeeded him. As I leaped to
the ground at the very door of the tomb he demanded
bucksheesh, and I gave him some coppers, whereat he
retired, and I marked him as the first and last man in
Egypt I have seen satisfied with a gift.

Reis Hassanein left the boat to cut across lots and
reach Manfaloot early in the day. We arrived at evening,

and he was already satisfied. He stood on the bank
waiting our arrival, and he did not venture to raise his
eyes to mine.

“Was all right, Reis Hassanein?” I shouted.

“You are always right, O Braheem Effendi,” was his
melancholy reply.

He had found not only a squall but a tempest in his
house.

“She said she knew I had another wife in Cairo,” said
he the next evening as we sat on deck together, smoking
quietly, as he told me his wrongs and afflictions; “and
when I denied it, she beat me, and she called in her father
and her mother and her brothers and all her family, and
they put me in a corner and kept me there till the boat
came. And when I went back in the evening, they cornered
me again, and one or another talked to me all night
and abused me, and called me all manner of names; and
if you please, O Howajji, I will not stop at Manfaloot
when we go down the river.”

We could not oblige the reis in this request, for one of
my most interesting adventures in Egypt occurred in the
crocodile pits at Maabdeh on the opposite shore, and at
Manfaloot, when we were descending the Nile. I believe
that the reis made it right with the family on the second
visit by virtue of cash and presents of dates from Nubia.

We awoke early in the morning on our approach to Es
Siout, the chief city of Upper Egypt.

The city lies back from the river, but the palace of
Latif Pasha, the resident governor, is directly on the
bank. A row of stone steps, designed especially for the
use of the viceroy, descends from the palace gate to the
water, and at the foot of these Abd-el-Atti laid up the
Phantom, assuming that the American Howajjis were sufficiently
noble to walk up such steps, especially as they
carried the firman of the viceroy himself.

We fired some guns on approaching the land, and a few
moments after touching the stakes two officers in uniform
came down by the side of the steps—to ask the names
and character of the new arrivals. Abd-el-Atti received
them on deck while we were at breakfast, and we
had scarcely finished when another officer in full Nizam
costume, attended by two aids, came on board and announced
that the governor himself would visit us.

We could not consent to this, and hastened up to the
court of the palace, where we met him just coming out,
and he returned with us to the boat.

The reception of guests in the East has been so frequently
described that I may run the risk of a repetition.
Yet I think I may venture, once for all, on a minute account
of this visit as an illustration of eastern manners.

Latif Pasha is one of the finest-looking men I have ever
seen. His complexion is white and clear, eyes black and
roving, and exquisitely-cut lip over which was a moustache,
closely trimmed, and his beard, in Turkish style,
also cut short; for a well-dressed Turkish gentleman never
wears a long beard. He was dressed in the Nizam costume,
all his clothing being of black cloth, his shawl a
heavy Damascus silk, wound around his waist, and a red
tarbouche on his head, with white takea showing under it.

As he entered, two officers took their position at the
door of the cabin, one on each side, and his pipe-bearer
advanced with his pipe ready-filled and lighted.

He seated himself on the starboard diwan, and Abd-el-Atti
stood in the centre, while we sat opposite, and then
commenced the usual salutations, repeated in various
forms. Latif Pasha understood French and English, but
he would not converse except in Arabic or Turkish,
through Abd-el-Atti as interpreter.

Coffee was served instantly on his taking his seat.

Oriental coffee is a dense, dark decoction, sweetened

and served in tiny cups, each cup fitting in a silver or
gold cup a little larger. The receiver touches his hand
to his breast and forehead as he takes it, and the host at
the same moment goes through the same form. The
coffee is sipped with a loud noise of the lips, and the
empty cup returned to a servant, who receives it on the
palm of one hand and covers it with the other. A wealthy
Turkish gentleman carries his own pipe with him, having
his pipe-bearer as a constant attendant. We were abundantly-well
provided with chibouks, and not unfrequently
filled ten or twelve at a time in the cabin.

The conversation, which began in the usual formal
style, gradually ran into general politics, and then into
general matters, and his excellency, finding our tobacco
and coffee and conversation all agreeable, sat the morning
out.

I am under very great obligations to Latif Pasha for a
pleasant winter in Egypt, and I passed a morning with
him afterward at Minieh, where I had opportunity to thank
him for his kindness. He furnished me with full letters
of credit on all Upper Egypt, by virtue of which I was
able to command all the assistance I desired at any time,
and was enabled to make my journeyings rapid, pleasant,
and successful.

He smoked splendidly, lipping his jeweled amber
mouth-piece as if he knew what a superb lip he had, and
sending clouds of smoke through his moustache and
around his fine face.

He apologized for not returning our salute in the morning,
as he had no gun loaded. He made up for it in the
evening.