 CHAPTER XVII. THE DESERT. Gaza is upon the verge of the desert, to which it stands in the same relation as a seaport to the sea. It is there that you charter your camels, the ships of the desert, and lay in your stores for the voyage. These preparations kept me in the town for some days. Disliking restraint, I declined making myself the guest of the governor, as it is usual and proper to do, but took up my quarters at the caravanserai, or Khan, as they call it in that part of Asia. Dithmetri had to make the arrangements for my journey, and in order to arm himself with sufficient authority for doing all that was required, he found it necessary to put himself in communication with the governor. The result of this diplomatic intercourse was that the governor, with his train of attendants, came to me one day at my caravanserai, and formally complained that Dithmetri had grossly insulted him. I was shocked at this, for the man was always attentive and civil to me, and I was disgusted at the idea of his having been rewarded with insult. Dithmetri was present when the complaint was made, and I angrily asked him whether it was true that he had really insulted the governor, and what the deuce he meant by it. As I asked, with the full certainty that Dithmetri as a matter of course would deny the charge, would swear that a wrong construction had been put upon his words, and that nothing was further from his thoughts, etc., etc., after the manner of the parliamentary people. But to my surprise he very plainly answered that he certainly had insulted the governor, and that rather grossly, but he said it was quite necessary to do this in order to strike terror and inspire respect. Yes, but without striking terror and inspiring respect, he, Dithmetri, would never be able to force on the arrangements for my journey, and Vosignora would be kept at Gaza for a month. This would have been awkward, and certainly I could not deny that poor Dithmetri had succeeded in his odd plan of inspiring respect, for at the very time that this explanation was going on in Italian, the governor seemed more than ever to me. The governor seemed more than ever, and more anxiously disposed to overwhelm me with assurances of good will, and proffers of his best services. All this kindness, or promise of kindness, I naturally received with courtesy, a courtesy that greatly perturbed Dithmetri, for he evidently feared that my civility would undo all the good that his insults had achieved. You will find, I think, that one of the greatest drawbacks to the pleasure of traveling in Asia is the being obliged more or less to make your way by bullying. It is true that your own lips are not soiled by the utterance of all the mean words that are spoken for you, and that you don't even know of the sham threats and the false promises and the venglorious boasts put forth by your dragomen. But now and then there happens some incident of the sort which I have just been mentioning, which forces you to believe, or suspect, that your dragomen is habitually fighting your battles for you in a way that you can hardly bear to think of. A caravancer eye is not ill adapted to the purposes for which it is meant. It forms the four sides of a large quadrangular court. The ground floor is used for warehouses, the first floor for guests, and the open court for the temporary reception of the camels, as well as for the loading and unloading of their burdens, and the transaction of mercantile business generally. The apartments used for the guests are small cells opening into a corridor which runs round the four sides of the court. While Stylane near the opening of my cell looking down into the court below, they arrived from the desert a caravan, that is, a large assemblage of travelers. It consisted chiefly of Moldavian pilgrims, who, to make their good work even more than complete, had begun by visiting the Shrine of the Virgin in Egypt and were now going on to Jerusalem. They had been overtaken in the desert by a gale of wind, which so drove the sand and raised up such mountains before them, that their journey had been terribly perplexed and obstructed, and their provisions, including water the most precious of all, had been exhausted long before they reached the end of their toilsome march. They were sadly way-worn. The arrival of the caravan drew many and various groups into the court. There was the Moldavian pilgrim with his sable dress and cap of fur and heavy masses of bushy hair. The Turk with his various and brilliant garments. The Arab, superbly stalking under his striped blanket, that hung like royalty upon his stately form. The jetty Ethiopian in his slavish frock. The sleek, smooth-faced scribe with his comely pillies, and his silver ink-box stuck in like a dagger at his girdle. And mingled with these were the camels, some standing, some kneeling and being unladen, some twisting round their long necks and gently stealing the straw from out of their own pack-saddles. In a couple of days I was ready to start. The way of providing for the passage of the desert is this. There is an agent in the town who keeps himself in communication with some of the desert Arabs that are hovering within a day's journey of the place. A party of these, upon being guaranteed against seizure or other ill-treatment at the hands of the governor, come into town, bringing with them the number of camels which you require, and then they stipulate for a certain sum to take you to the place of your destination in a given time. The agreement which they thus enter into includes a safe conduct through their country as well as the hire of the camels. According to the contract made with me, I was to reach Cairo within ten days from the commencement of the journey. I had four camels, one for my baggage, one for each of my servants, and one for myself. Four Arabs, the owners of the camels, came with me on foot. My stores were a small soldier's tent, two bags of dried bread bought from the convent at Jerusalem, a couple of bottles of wine from the same source, two goatskins filled with water, tea, sugar, a cold tongue, and, of all things in the world, a jar of Irish butter which Misery had purchased from some merchant. There was also a small sack of charcoal, for the greater part of the desert through which we were to pass is destitute of fuel. The camel kneels to receive her load, and for a while she will allow the packing to go on with silent resignation. But when she begins to suspect that her master is putting more than a just burden upon her poor hump, she turns round her sepal neck and looks sadly upon the increasing load, and then gently remonstrates against the wrong with the sigh of a patient wife. If sighs will not move you, she can weep. You soon learn to pity and soon to love her, for the sake of her gentle and womanish ways. You cannot, of course, put an English or any other riding saddle upon the back of the camel, but your quilt or carpet, or whatever you carry for the purpose of lying on at night, is folded and fastened onto the pack saddle upon the top of the hump, and on this you ride, or rather sit. You sit as a man sits on a chair when he sits astride and faces the back of it. I made an improvement on this plan. I had my English stirrup strapped onto the crossbars of the pack saddle, and thus by gaining rest from my dangling legs, and gaining, too, the power of varying my position more easily than I otherwise could have done, I added very much to my comfort. Don't forget to do as I did. The camel, like the elephant, is one of the old-fashioned sort of animals that still walk along upon the now nearly exploded plan of the ancient beasts that lived before the flood. She moves forward both her near legs at the same time, and then awkwardly swings round her off shoulder and haunch, so as to repeat the maneuver on that side. Her pace, therefore, is an odd, disjointed, and disjoining sort of movement that is rather disagreeable at first, but you soon grow reconciled to it. The height to which you are raised is of great advantage to you in passing the burning sands of the desert, for the air at such a distance from the ground is much cooler and more lively than that which circulates beneath. For several miles beyond Gaza, the land which had been plentifully watered by the rains of the last week was covered with rich veger, and thickly jeweled with meadow flowers so fresh and fragrant that I began to grow almost uneasy, to fancy that the very desert was receding before me, and that the long desired adventure of passing its burning sands was to end in a mere ride across a field. But as I advanced, the true character of the country began to display itself with sufficient clearness to dispel my apprehensions, and before the close of my first day's journey I had the gratification of finding that I was surrounded on all sides by a tract of real sand, and had nothing at all to complain of except that there peeped forth at intervals a few isolated blades of grass, and many of those stunted shrubs which are the accustomed food of the camel. Before sunset I came up with an encampment of Arabs, the encampment from which my camels had been brought, and my tent was pitched amongst theirs. I was now amongst the true Bedouins. Almost every man of this race closely resembles his brethren. Almost every man has large and finely formed features, but his face is so thoroughly stripped of flesh, and the white folds from his headgear fall down by his haggard cheeks so much in the burial fashion that he looks quite sad and ghastly. His large dark orbs roll slowly and solemnly over the white of his deep-set eyes. His countenance shows painful thought and long suffering, the suffering of one fallen from a high estate. His gait is strangely majestic, and he marches along with his simple blanket as though he were wearing the purple. His common talk is a series of piercing screams and cries, more painful to the ear than the most excruciating fine music that I ever endured. The Bedouin women are not treasured up like the wives and daughters of other Orientals, and indeed they seemed almost entirely free from the restraints imposed by jealousy. The faint which they made of concealing their faces from me was always slight. They never, I think, wore the Yashmak properly fixed. When they first saw me they used to hold up a part of their drapery with one hand across their faces, but they sell them persevered very steadily in subjecting me to this privation. Unhappy beings they were sadly plain. The awful haggardness that gave something of character to the faces of the men was sheer ugliness in the poor women. It is a great shame, but the truth is that except when we refer to the beautiful devotion of the mother to her child, all the fine things we say and think about women apply only to those who are tolerably good-looking or graceful. These Arab women were so plain and clumsy that they seemed to me to be fit for nothing but another and a better world. They may have been good women enough so far as relates to the exercise of the minor virtues, but they had so grossly neglected the prime duty of looking pretty in this transitory life that I could not at all forgive them. They seemed to feel the weight of their guilt and to be truly and humbly penitent. I had the complete command of their affections for at any moment I could make their young hearts bound and their old hearts jump by offering a handful of tobacco. And yet, believe me, it was not in the first soiree that my store of Latakia was exhausted. The Bedouin women have no religion. This is partly the cause of their clumsiness. Perhaps if from Christian girls they would learn how to pray their souls might become more gentle and their limbs be clothed with grace. You who are going into their country have a direct personal interest in knowing something about Arab hospitality, but the deuce of it is that the poor fellows with whom I have happened to pitch my tent were scarcely ever in a condition to exercise that magnanimous virtue with much eclat. Indeed, Miseria's canteen generally enabled me to outdo my hosts in the matter of entertainment. They were always courteous, however, and were never backward in offering me the yawurt, a kind of way, which is the principal delicacy to be found amongst the wandering tribes. Practically, I think Child Harold would have found it a dreadful bore to make the desert his dwelling place, for at all events, if he adopted the life of the Arabs he would have tasted no solitude. The tents are partitioned, not so as to defy the child and the fair spirit who is his minister from the rest of the world, but so as to separate the twenty or thirty brown men that sit screaming in the one compartment from the fifty or sixty brown women and children that scream and squeak in the other. If you adopt the Arab life for the sake of seclusion, you will be horribly disappointed, for you will find yourself in perpetual contact with a mass of hot, fellow creatures. It is true that all who are inmates of the same tent are related to each other, but I am not quite sure that that circumstance adds much to the charm of such a life. At all events, before you finally determine to become an Arab, try a gentle experiment. Take one of those small, shabby houses in Mayfair and shut yourself up in it with forty or fifty shrill cousins for a couple of weeks in July. In passing the desert you will find your Arabs wanting to start and to rest at all sorts of odd times. They like, for instance, to be off at one in the morning and to rest during the whole of the afternoon. You must not give way to their wishes in this respect. I tried their plan once and found it very harassing and unwholesome. An ordinary tent can give you very little protection against heat, for the fire strikes fiercely through single canvas. And you soon find that whilst you lie crouching and striving to hide yourself from the blazing face of the sun, his power is harder to bear than it is where you boldly defy him from the airy heights of your camel. It had been arranged with my Arabs that they were to bring with them all the food which they would want for themselves during the passage of the desert. But as we rested at the end of the first day's journey by the side of an Arab encampment, my camelmen found all that they required for that night in the tents of their own brethren. On the evening of the second day, however, just before we encamped for the night, my four Arabs came to Dithmetri and formerly announced that they had not brought with them one atom of food and that they looked entirely to my supplies for their daily bread. This was awkward intelligence. We were now just two days deep in the desert, and I had brought with me no more bread than might be reasonably required for myself and my European attendance. I believed at the moment, for it seemed likely enough, that the men had really mistaken the terms of the arrangement, and feeling that the bore of being put upon half rations would be a less evil, and even to myself a less inconvenience, than the starvation of my Arabs, I had once told Dithmetri to assure them that my bread should be equally shared with all. Dithmetri, however, did not approve of this concession. He assured me quite positively that the Arabs thoroughly understood the agreement, and that if they were now without food they had willfully brought themselves into this strait for the wretched purpose of bettering their bargain by the value of a few paras worth of bread. This suggestion made me look at the affair in a new light. I should have been glad enough to put up with the slight privation to which my concession would subject me, and could have borne to witness the semi-starvation of poor Dithmetri with a fine philosophical calm. But it seemed to me that the scheme, if scheme it were, had something of audacity in it, and was well enough calculated to try the extent of my softness. I well knew the danger of allowing such a trial to result in a conclusion that I was one who might be easily managed, and therefore, after thoroughly satisfying myself from Dithmetri's clear and repeated assertions that the Arabs had really understood the arrangement, I determined that they should not now violate it by taking advantage of my position in the midst of their big desert. So I desired Dithmetri to tell them that they should touch no bread of mine. We stopped, and the tent was pitched. The Arabs came to me and prayed loudly for bread. I refused them. Then we die. God's will be done. I gave the Arabs to understand that I regretted their perishing by hunger, but that I should bear this calmly like any other misfortune not my own, that in short I was happily resigned to their fate. The men would have talked a great deal, but they were under the disadvantage of addressing me through a hostile interpreter. They looked hard upon my face, but they found no hope there. So at last they retired as they pretended to lay them down and die. In about 10 minutes from this time, I found that the Arabs were busily cooking their bread. Their pretence of having brought no food was false, and was only invented for the purpose of saving it. They had a good bag of meal which they had contrived to stow away under the baggage upon one of the camels in such a way as to escape notice. In Europe the detection of a scheme like this would have occasioned a disagreeable feeling between the master and the delinquent, but you would no more recoil from an oriental on account of a matter of this sort than in England you would reject a horse that had tried and failed to throw you. Indeed, I felt quite good humoredly toward my Arabs, because they had so woefully failed in their wretched attempt, and because, as it turned out, I had done what was right. Day two, poor fellows evidently began to like me immensely, on account of the hard-heartedness which had enabled me to baffle their scheme. The Arabs adhere to those ancestral principles of bread-baking, which have been sanctioned by the experience of ages. The very first baker of bread that ever lived must have done his work exactly as the Arab does at this day. He takes some meal and holds it out in the hollow of his hands, while his comrade pours over it a few drops of water. He then mashes up the moistened flour into a paste, which he pulls into small pieces and thrusts into the embers. His way of baking exactly resembles the craft or mystery of roasting chestnuts as practiced by children. There is the same prudence and circumspection in choosing a good birth for the morsel, the same enterprise and self-sacrificing valor in pulling it out with the fingers. The manner of my daily march was this. At about an hour before dawn I rose and made the most of about a pint of water, which I allowed myself for washing. Then I breakfasted upon tea and bread. As soon as the beasts were loaded I mounted my camel and pressed forward. My poor Arabs, being on foot, would sometimes moan with fatigue and pray for rest, but I was anxious to enable them to perform their contract for bringing me to Cairo within the stipulated time, and I did not therefore allow a halt until the evening came. About midday or soon after, Messara used to bring up his camel alongside of mine and supply me with a piece of bread softened in water, for it was dried hard like board, and also as long as it lasted, with a piece of the tongue. After this there came into my hand how well I remembered it, the little tin cup half filled with wine and water. As long as you were journeying in the interior of the desert you have no particular point to make for as your resting place. The endless sands yield nothing but small stunted shrubs. Even these fail after the first two or three days, and from that time you pass over broad plains, you pass over newly reared hills, you pass through valleys that the storm of the last week has dug, and the hills and the valleys are sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again. The earth is so samely that your eyes turn towards heaven, towards heaven I mean in the sense of sky. You look to the sun, for he is your taskmaster, and by him you know the measure of the work that you have done, and the measure of the work that remains for you to do. He comes when you strike your tent in the early morning, and then for the first hour of the day as you move forward on your camel he stands at your near side and makes you know that the whole day's toil is before you. Then for a while and a long while you see him no more, for you are veiled and shrouded, and dare not look upon the greatness of his glory, but you know where he strides overhead by the touch of his flaming sword. No words are spoken, but your Arabs moan, your camel sigh, your skin glows, your shoulders ache, and for sights you see the pattern and web of the silk that veils your eyes and the glare of the outer light. Time labors on, your skin glows and your shoulders ache, your Arabs moan, your camel sigh, and you see the same pattern in the silk and the same glare of light beyond it, but conquering time marches on, and by and by the descending sun has compassed the heaven, and now softly touches your right arm, and throws your lank shadow over the sand right along on the way to Persia. Then again you look upon his face, for his power is all veiled in his beauty, and the redness of flames has become the redness of roses, the fair, wavy cloud that fled in the morning now comes to his sight once more, comes blushing, yet still comes on, comes burning with blushes, yet hastens and clings to his side. Then arrives your time for resting. The world about you is all your own, and there where you will, you pitch your solitary tent. There is no living things to dispute your choice. When at last the spot had been fixed upon, and we came to a halt, one of the Arabs would touch the chest of my camel and utter at the same time a peculiar gurgling sound. The beast instantly understood and obeyed the sign, and slowly sunk under me till she brought her body to a level with the ground. Then, gladly enough, I alighted. The rest of the camels were unloaded and turned loose to browse upon the shrubs of the desert, where shrubs there were, or where these failed to wait for the small quantity of food that was allowed them out of our stores. My servants, helped by the Arabs, busied themselves in pitching the tent and kindling the fire. Whilst this was doing, I used to walk away towards the east, confiding in the print of my foot as a guide for my return. Apart from the cheering voices of my attendance, I could better know and feel the loneliness of the desert. The influence of such scenes, however, was not of a softening kind, but filled me rather with a sort of childish exultation in the self-sufficiency which enabled me to stand thus alone in the wideness of Asia. A short-lived pride, for wherever man wanders, he still remains tethered by the chain that links him to his kind. And so, when the night closed around me, I began to return, to return, as it were, to my own gate. Reaching at last some high ground, I could see and see with delight the fire of our small encampment. And when at last I regained the spot, it seemed to me a very home that had sprung up for me in the midst of these solitudes. My Arabs were busy with their bread. Misery, rattling tea-cups, the little kettle with her odd, old maidish look sat humming away old songs about England. And two or three yards from my fire, my tent stood prim and tight with open portal, and with welcoming look, like the old armchair of our lyricist's sweet lady Anne. At the beginning of my journey, the night breezed blue coldly. When that happened, the dry sand was heaped up outside round the skirts of the tent. And so the wind, that everywhere else could sweep as he listed along these dreary plains, was forced to turn aside in his course, and make way as he ought for the Englishman. Then within my tent there were heaps of luxuries, dining rooms, dressing rooms, libraries, bedrooms, drawing rooms, oratories, all crowded into the space of a hearth rug. The first night I remember, with my books and maps about me, I wanted light. They brought me a taper, and immediately from out of the silent desert there rushed in a flood of life unseen before. Monsters of moths of all shapes and hues that never before perhaps had looked upon the shining of a flame, now madly thronged into my tent, and dashed through the fire of the candle till they fairly extinguished it with their burning limbs. Those who had failed in attaining this martyrdom suddenly became serious, and clung despondingly to the canvas. By and by there was brought to me the fragrant tea and big masses of scorched and scorching toast, and the butter that had come all the way to me in this desert of Asia from out of that poor, dear, starving Ireland. I feasted like a king, like four kings, like a boy in the fourth form. When the cold, sullen morning dawned and my people began to load the camels, I always felt lothed to give back to the waist this little spot of ground that had glowed for a while with the cheerfulness of a human dwelling. One by one the cloaks, the saddles, the baggage, the hundred things that strewed the ground and made it look so familiar, all these were taken away and laid upon the camels. A speck in the broad tracts of Asia remained still impressed with the mark of patent portmentos and the heels of London boots. The embers of the fire lay black and cold upon the sand, and these were the signs we left. My tent was spared to the last, but when all else was ready for the start, then came its fall. The pegs were drawn, the canvas shivered, and in less than a minute there was nothing that remained of my genial home, but only a pole and a bundle. The encroaching Englishman was off, and instant upon the fall of the canvas, like an owner who had waited and watched, the genius of the desert stocked in. To servants, as I suppose of any other Europeans, not much accustomed to amuse themselves by fancy or memory, it often happens that after a few days' journeying the loneliness of the desert will become frightfully oppressive. Upon my poor fellows the access of melancholy came heavy, and all at once, as a blow from above. They bent their necks and bore it as best they could, but their joy was great on the fifth day when we came to an oasis called Gatia. For here we found encamped a caravan, that is an assemblage of travelers, from Cairo. The Oriental living in cities never passed the desert except in this way. Many will wait for weeks, and even for months, until a sufficient number of persons can be found ready to undertake the journey at the same time, until the flock of sheep is big enough to fancy itself a match for wolves. They could not, I think, really secure themselves against any serious danger by this contrivance, for though they have arms, they are so little accustomed to use them, and so utterly unorganized, that they never could make good their resistance to robbers of the slightest respectability. It is not of the Bedouins that such travelers are afraid. For the safe conduct granted by the chief of the ruling tribe is never, I believe, violated. But it is said that there are deserters and scamps of various sorts, who hover about the skirts of the desert particularly on the Cairo side, and are anxious to succeed to the property of any poor devils whom they may find more weak and defenseless than themselves. These people from Cairo profess to be amazed at the ludicrous disproportion between their numerical forces and mine. They could not understand, and they wanted to know, by what strange privilege it is that an Englishman with a brace of pistols and a couple of servants rides safely across the desert whilst they, the natives of the neighboring cities, are forced to travel in troops, or rather in herds. One of them got a few minutes of private conversation with Dithmetry, and ventured to ask him anxiously whether the English did not travel under the protection of evil demons. I had previously known, from Methly, I think, who had traveled in Persia, that this notion, so conducive to the safety of our countrymen, is generally prevalent amongst Orientals. It owes its origin partly to the strong willfulness of the English gentleman, which, not being backed by any visible authority, either civil or military, seems perfectly superhuman to the soft Asiatic. But partly, too, to the magic of the banking system, by force of which the wealthy traveler will make all his journeys without carrying a handful of coin, and yet when he arrives at a city will rain down showers of gold. The theory is that the English traveler has committed some sin against God and his conscience, and that for this the evil spirit has hold of him and drives him from his home like a victim of the old Grecian furies, and forces him to travel over countries far and strange, and most chiefly over deserts and desolate places, and to stand upon the sights of cities that once were and are now no more, and to grope among the tombs of dead men. Often enough there is something of truth in this notion. Often enough the wandering Englishmen is guilty, if guilt it be, of some pride or ambition, big or small, imperial or parochial, which being offended has made the lone place more tolerable than ballrooms to him, a sinner. I can understand the sort of amazement of the orientals at the scantiness of the retinue with which an Englishman passes at the desert, for I was somewhat struck myself when I saw one of my countrymen making his way across the wilderness in this simple style. At first there was a mere moving speck on the horizon. My party, of course, became all alive with excitement, and there were many surmises. Soon it appeared that three laden camels were approaching, and that two of them carried riders. In a little while we saw that one of the riders wore the European dress, and at last the travelers were pronounced to be an English gentleman and his servant. By their side there were a couple, I think, of Arabs on foot, and this was the whole party. You, you love sailing. In returning from a cruise to the English coast, you see often enough a fisherman's humble boat far away from all shores, with an ugly black sky above and an angry sea below. You watch the grizzly old man at the helm carrying his craft with strange skill through the turmoil of waters, and the boy supple-limbed, yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast. You see him understanding commandments from the jerk of his father's white eyebrow, now belaying and now letting go, now scrunching himself down into mere ballast, or bailing out death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight, and yet when I see it I always stare anew, and with a kind of titanic exultation, because that a poor boat with the brain of a man and the hands of a boy on board can match herself so bravely against black heaven and ocean. Well, so when you have traveled for days and days over an eastern desert without meeting the likeness of a human being, and then at last see an English shooting jacket and his servant come listlessly slouching along from out of the forward horizon, you stare at the wide un-proportion between this slender company and the boundless planes of sand through which they are keeping their way. This Englishman, as I afterwards found, was a military man returning to his country from India, and crossing the desert at this part in order to go through Palestine. As for me, I had come pretty straight from England, and so here we met in the wilderness at about halfway from our respective starting points. As we approached each other, it became with me a question whether we should speak. I thought it likely that the stranger would accost me, and in the event of his doing so, I was quite ready to be as sociable and chatty as I could be, according to my nature. But still, I could not think of anything particular that I had to say to him. Of course, among civilized people, then not having anything to say is no excuse at all for not speaking. But I was shy and indolent, and I felt no great wish to stop and talk like a morning visitor in the midst of these broad solitudes. The traveler perhaps felt as I did, for except that we lifted our hands to our caps and waved our arms in courtesy, we passed each other as if we had passed in Bond Street. Our attendants, however, were not to be cheated of the delight that they felt in speaking to new listeners and hearing fresh voices once more. The masters, therefore, had no sooner passed each other than their respective servants quietly stopped and entered into conversation. As soon as my camel found that her companions were not following her, she caught the social feeling and refused to go on. I felt the absurdity of the situation and determined to accost the stranger if only to avoid the awkwardness of remaining stuck fast in the desert whilst our servants were amusing themselves. When, with this intent, I turned round my camel, I found that the gallant officer, who had passed me by about thirty or forty yards, was exactly in the same predicament as myself. I put my now-willing camel in motion and rode up towards the stranger, who, seeing this, followed my example and came forward to meet me. He was the first to speak. He was much too courteous to address me, as if he admitted the possibility of my wishing to accost him from any feeling of mere sociability or civilian-like love of vain talk. On the contrary, he had once attributed my advances to a laudable wish of acquiring statistical information, and accordingly, when we got within speaking distance, he said, I dare say you wish to know how the plague is going on at Cairo. And then he went on to say, he regretted that his information did not enable him to give me in numbers a perfectly accurate statement of the daily deaths. He afterwards talked pleasantly enough upon other and less ghastly subjects. I thought him manly and intelligent, a worthy one of the few thousand strong Englishmen to whom the Empire of India is committed. The night after the meeting with the people of the caravan, Dithmetri, alarmed by their warnings, took upon himself to keep watch all night in the tent. No robbers came except a jackal that poked his nose into my tent from some motive of rational curiosity. Dithmetri did not shoot him for fear of waking me. These brutes swarm in every part of Syria, and there were many of them even in the midst of the void sands that would seem to give such poor promise of food. I can hardly tell what prey they could be hoping for, unless it were that they might find now and then the carcass of some camel that had died on the journey. They do not marshal themselves into great packs like the wild dogs of eastern cities, but follow their prey in families, like the place hunters of Europe. Their voices are frightfully like to the shouts and cries of human beings. If you lie awake in your tent at night, you are almost continually hearing some hungry family as it sweeps along in full cry. You hear the exulting scream with which the sagacious dam first wins the carrion, and the shrill response of the unanimous cubs as they sniff the tainted air. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, whose gift is it in mama? Once during this passage, my Arabs lost their way among the hills of loose sand that surrounded us. But after a while we were lucky enough to recover our right line of march. The same day we fell in with a sheik, the head of a family, that actually dwells at no great distance from this part of the desert during nine months of the year. The man carried a matchlock, of which he was very proud. We stopped and sat down and rested a while for the sake of a little talk. There was much that I should have liked to ask this man, but he could not understand Dithmetri's language, and the process of getting at his knowledge by double interpretation through my Arabs was unsatisfactory. I discovered, however, and my Arabs knew of that fact, that this man and his family lived habitually for nine months of the year without touching or seeing either bread or water. The stunted shrub growing at intervals through the sand in this part of the desert enables the camel mares to yield a little milk, which furnishes the sole food and drink of their owner and his people. During the other three months, the hottest of the months I suppose, even this resource fails, and then the sheik and his people are forced to pass into another district. You would ask me why the man should not remain always in that district which supplies him with water during three months of the year, but I don't know enough of Arab politics to answer the question. The sheik was not a good specimen of the effect produced by the diet to which he is subjected. He was very small, very spare, and sadly shriveled, a poor, overroasted snipe, a mere cinder of a man. I made him sit down by my side and gave him a piece of bread and a cup of water from out of my goatskins. This was not very tempting drink to look at, for it had become turbid and was deeply reddened by some colouring matter contained in the skins, but it kept its sweetness and tasted like a strong decoction of Russian leather. The sheik sifted this drop by drop with ineffable relish and rolled his eyes solemnly round between every draught, as though the drink were the drink of the prophet, and had come from the seventh heaven. An inquiry about distances led to the discovery that this sheik had never heard of the division of time into hours. My Arabs themselves, I think, were rather surprised at this. About this part of my journey I saw the likeness of a freshwater lake. I saw, as it seemed, a broad sheet of calm water that stretched far and fair towards the south, stretching deep into winding creeks and hemmed in by jutting promontories and shelving smooth off towards the shallow side. On its bosom the reflected fire of the sun lay playing, and seemed to float upon waters deep and still. Though I knew of the cheat, it was not till the spongy foot of my camel had almost trodden in the seeming waters that I could undeceive my eyes, for the shoreline was quite true and natural. I soon saw the cause of the phantasm. A sheet of water heavily impregnated with salts had filled this great hollow, and when dried up by evaporation had left a white saline deposit that exactly marked the space which the waters had covered, and thus sketched a good shoreline. The minute crystals of the salt sparkled in the sun, and so looked like the face of a lake that is calm and smooth. The pace of the camel is irksome and makes your shoulders and loins ache from the peculiar way in which you are obliged to suit yourself to the movements of the beast. But you soon, of course, become enured to this, and after the first two days this way of traveling became so familiar to me that, poor sleeper as I am, I now and then slumbered for some moments together on the back of my camel. On the fifth day of my journey the air above lay dead, and all the whole earth that I could reach with my utmost sight and keenest listening was still and lifeless as some dispeopled and forgotten world that rolls round and round in the heavens through wasted floods of light. The sun growing fiercer and fiercer shone down more mightily now than ever on me he shone before, and as I dropped my head under his fire and closed my eyes against the glare that surrounded me I slowly fell asleep, for how many minutes or moments I cannot tell, but after a while I was gently awakened by a peel of church bells, my native bells, the innocent bells of Marlon, that never before sent forth their music beyond the Blagan Hills. My first idea naturally was that I still remained fast under the power of a dream. I roused myself and drew aside the silk that covered my eyes, and plunged my bare face into the light. Then at least I was well enough awakened, but still those old Marlon bells rung on, not ringing for joy, but properly, prosely, steadily, merrily ringing for church. After a while the sound died slowly away. It happened that neither I nor any of my party had a watch by which to measure the exact time of its lasting, but it seemed to me that about ten minutes had passed before the bells ceased. I attributed the effect to the great heat of the sun, the perfect dryness of the clear air through which I moved, and the deep stillness of all around me. It seemed to me that these causes, by occasioning a great tension and consequent susceptibility of the hearing organs, had rendered them liable to tingle under the passing touch of some mere memory that must have swept across my brain in a moment of sleep. Since my return to England it has been told me that like sounds have been heard at sea, and that the sailor be calmed under a vertical sun in the midst of the wide ocean has listened in trembling wonder to the chime of his own village bells. At this time I kept a poor shabby pretense of a journal, which just enabled me to know the day of the month and the week according to the European calendar, and when in my tent at night I got out my pocket-book and found that the day was Sunday, and roughly allowing for the difference of time in this longitude, I concluded that at the moment of my hearing that strange peel the church-going bells of Marlin must have been actually calling the prim congregation of the parish to morning prayer. The coincidence amused me faintly, but I could not pluck up the least hope that the effect which I had experienced was anything other than an illusion, an illusion liable to be explained, as every illusion is in these days, by some of the philosophers who guess at nature's riddles. It would have been sweeter to believe that my kneeling mother by some pious enchantment had asked and found this spell to rouse me from my scandalous forgetfulness of God's holy day, but my fancy was too weak to carry a faith like that. Indeed, the veil through which the bells of Marlin send their song is a highly respectable veil, and its people, save one, two, or three, are wholly unaddicted to the practice of magical arts. After the fifth day of my journey I no longer traveled over shifting hills, but came upon a dead level, a dead level bed of sand, quite hard, and studded with small shining pebbles. The heat grew fierce. There was no valley nor hollow, no hill nor mound, no shadow of hill nor of mound by which I could mark the way I was making. Hour by hour I advanced and saw no change. I was still the very center of a round horizon. Hour by hour I advanced, and still there was the same and the same and the same, the same circle of flaming sky, the same circle of sand still glaring with light and fire. Over all the heaven above, over all the earth beneath, there was no visible power that could balk the fierce will of the sun. He rejoiced as a strong man to run a race. His going forth was from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it, and there was nothing hid from the heat thereof. From pole to pole, and from the east to the west, he brandished his fiery scepter as though he had usurped all heaven and earth. As he bid the soft Persian in ancient times, so now, and fiercely too, he bid me bow down and worship him. So now in his pride he seemed to command me, and say, Thou shalt have none other gods but me. I was all alone before him. There were these two pitted together and face to face, the mighty sun for one, and for the other, this poor, pale, solitary self of mine that I always carry about with me. But on the eighth day, and before I had yet turned away from Jehovah for the glittering god of the Persians, there appeared a dark line upon the edge of the forward horizon, and soon the line deepened into a delicate fringe that sparkled here and there as though it were sown with diamonds. There then before me were the gardens and the minarets of Egypt and the mighty works of the Nile, and I, the eternal ego that I am, I had lived to see, and I saw them. When evening came I was still within the confines of the desert, and my tent was pitched as usual. But one of my Arabs stalked away rapidly towards the west, without telling me the errand on which he was bent. After a while he returned, he had toiled on a graceful service. He had traveled all the way onto the border of the living world, and brought me back for token and ear of rice, full, fresh, green. The next day I entered upon Egypt, and floated along, for the delight was as the delight of bathing, through green, wavy fields of rice and pastures fresh and plentiful, and divided into the cold vergera of groves and gardens, and quenched my hot eyes in shade as though in deep, rushing waters. End of Chapter 17 Red by Colinda in Lunaburg, Germany, on March 7th, 2009. CHAPTER 18 CHIRO AND THE PLAGE During the whole time of my stay the plague was so master of the city, and showed itself so staringly in every street and every alley, that I can't now affect to dissociate the two ideas. When coming from the desert I rode through a village which lies near to the city on the eastern side. There approached me with busy face and earnest gestures, a personage in the Turkish dress. His long flowing beard gave him rather a majestic look, but his bristmas of menna and his visible anxiety to accost me seemed strange and in oriental. The man in fact was French, or of French origin, and his object was to warn me of the plague and prevent me from entering the city. Arrêtez-vous, monsieur, je vous en prie. Arrêtez-vous, et ne faut pas entrer dans la vie, la peste iraie pas tout. Oui, je sais, même je, je dis la peste, la peste, c'est de la peste, qu'est la question? Oui, je sais, même je, je dis encore la peste, la peste, je vous conjure de ne pas entrer dans la vie, vous seriez dans une vie impastée. Oui, je sais, même je, je dois donc vous avertir tout bonnement que si vous entrer dans la vie, vous serez, enfin, vous serez compromis. Oui, je sais, mais... The Frenchman was at last convinced that it was vain to reason with a mere Englishman who could not understand what it was to be compromised. I thank him most sincerely for his kindly meant warning. In hot countries it is very unusual indeed for a man to go out in the glare of the sun and give free advice to a stranger. When I arrived at Cairo I summoned Osman Effendi, who was, as I knew, the owner of several houses, and would be able to provide me with apartment. He had no difficulty in doing this, for there was not one European traveller in Cairo besides myself. Poor Osman, he met me with a sorrowful countenance, for the fear of the plagues had heavily on his soul. He seemed as if he felt that he was doing wrong in lending me a resting place, and he betrayed such a listlessness about temporal matters as one might look for in a man who believed that his days were numbered. He called me too soon after my arrival, coming out for the public baths, and from that time forward he was sadly afraid of me, for he shared the opinions of Europeans with respect to the effect of contagion. Osman's history is a curious one. He was a Scotchman bone, and when very young, being then a drummer boy, he landed in Egypt with phrases false. He was taken prisoner, and, according to Mohammedan custom, the alternative of death or the Quran was offered to him. He did not choose death, and therefore went through the ceremonies which were necessary for turning him into a good Mohammedan. But what amused me most in his history was this, that very soon after having embraced Islam he was obliged in practice to become curious and discriminating in his new faith, to make war upon Mohammedan dissenters, and follow the orthodox standard of the Prophet in fierce campaigns against the Wahhabis who are the Unitarians of the Muslim world. The Wahhabis were crushed, and Osman, returning home in triumph from his holy wars, began to flourish in the world. He acquired property and became a Fendi, or gentleman. At the time of my visit to Cairo he seemed to be much respected by his brother Mohammedans, and gave pledge of his sincere alienation from Christianity by keeping a couple of wives. He affected the same sort of reserve in mentioning them as is generally shown by Orientals. He invited me, indeed, to see his harem, but he made both his wives bundle out before I was admitted. He felt, as it seemed to me, that neither of them would bear criticism, and I think that this idea, rather than any motive of sincere jealousy, induced him to keep them out of sight. The rooms of the harem reminded me of an English nursery rather than of a Mohammedan paradise. One is apt to judge of a woman before one sees her by the air of elegance or coarseness with which she surrounds her home. I judged Osman's wives by this test and condemned them both. But the strangest feature in Osman's character was his inextinguishable nationality. In vain they had brought him over the seas in early boyhood. In vain had he suffered captivity, conversion, circumcision. In vain they had passed him through fire in their Arabian campaigns. They could not cut away, or burn out, poor Osman's inborn love of all that was Scotch. In vain man called him a fendi. In vain he swept along in eastern robes. In vain the rival wives adorned his harem. The joy of his heart still plainly lay in this, that he had three shelves of books and that the books were thoroughbred Scotch. The Edinburgh this, the Edinburgh that, and above all our recollect, he prided himself upon the Edinburgh Cabinet Library. The fear of the plague is its forerunner. It is likely enough that at the time of my seeing poor Osman the deadly taint was beginning to creep through his veins, but it was not till after I had left Cairo that he was visibly stricken. He died. As soon as I had seen all that I wanted to see in Cairo and in the neighbourhood, I wished to make my escape from a city that lay under the terrible curse of the plague. But misery fell ill, in consequence I believe of the hardships which he had been suffering in my service. After a while he recovered sufficiently to undertake a journey, but then there was some difficulty in procuring beasts of burden and it was not till the nineteenth day of my sojourn that I quitted the city. During all this time the power of the plague was rapidly increasing. When I first arrived it was said that the daily number of accidents by plague, out of a population of about two hundred thousand, did not exceed four or five hundred. But before I went away the deaths were reckoned at twelve hundred a day. I had no means of knowing whether the numbers, given out as I believe they were, by officials, were at all correct, but I could not help knowing that from day to day the number of the dead was increasing. My quarters were in a street which was one of the chief thoroughfares of the city. The funerals in Cairo take place between daybreak and noon, and as I was generally in my rooms during this part of the day I could form some opinion as to the bristness of the plague. I don't mean this for a sly insinuation that I got up every morning with the sun. It was not so. But the funerals of most people in decent circumstances at Cairo are attended by singers and howlers, and the performances of these people woke me in the early morning and prevented me from remaining in ignorance of what was going on in the street below. These funerals were very simply conducted. The bear was a shallow wooden tray carried upon a light and weak wooden frame. The tray had, in general, no lid, but the body was more or less hidden from view by a shawl or scarf. The hole was borne upon the shoulders of men who contrived to cut along with their birthing at a great pace. Two or three singers generally proceeded the bear. The howlers, who were paid for their vocal labours, followed after, and last of all came such of the dead men's friends and relations as could keep up with such a rapid procession. These, especially the women, would get terribly blown and would struggle back into the rear. Many were fairly beaten off. I never observed any appearance of mourning in the mourners. The pace was too severe for any solemn affectation of grief. When first I arrived at Cairo, the funerals that daily pass under my windows were many, but still there were frequent and long intervals without a single howl. Every day, however, except one, when I fenced that I observed a diminution of funerals, these intervals became less frequent than shorter, and at last the passing of the howlers from mourn till noon was almost incessant. I believe that but one half of the whole people was carried off by this visitation. The Orientals, however, have more quiet fortitude than Europeans under afflictions of this sort, and they never allow the plague to interfere with their religious usages. I wrote one day round the Great Burial Ground. The tombs are strewed over great expanse among the vast mountains of rubbish, the accumulations of many centuries, which surround the city. The ground, unlike the Turkish cities of the dead, which are made so beautiful by their dark cypresses, has nothing to sweeten malachally, nothing to mitigate the odiousness of death. Carnivorous beasts and birds possess the place by night, and now in the fair morning it was all alive with fresh commas, alive with dead. Yet at this very time, when the plague was raging so furiously, and on this very ground, which resounded so mournfully with the howls of arriving funerals, preparations were going on for the religious festival called the Kurban Baylan. Tents were pitched, and swings hung for the amusement of children, a ghastly holiday, but the Mohammedans take a pride and adjust pride in following their ancient customs undisturbed by the shadow of death. I did not hear whilst I was at Cairo that any prayer for a mission of the plague had been offered up in the mosques. I believe that however frightful the ravages of the disease may be, the Mohammedans refrain from approaching heaven with their complaints until the plague has endured for a long space, and then at last they pray God not that the plague may cease, but that it may go to another city. A good Muslim seems to take pride in repudiating the European notion that the will of God can be eluded by eluding the touch of a sleeve. When I went to see the pyramids of Sakara, I was the guest of a noble old fellow, an Osmanli, whose soft rolling language it was a luxury to hear after suffering, as I had suffered of late, from the shrieking tongue of the Arabs. This man was aware of the European ideas about contagion, and his first care, therefore, was to assure me that not a single instance of plague had occurred in his village. He then inquired as to the progress of the plague at Cairo. I had but a bad account to give. Up to this time my host had carefully refrained from touching me out of respect to the European theory of contagion, but as soon as it was made plain that he and not I would be the person endangered by contact, he gently laid his hand upon my arm, in order to make me feel sure that the circumstance of my coming from an infected city did not occasion him the least uneasiness. In that touch there was true hospitality. Very different is the faith and the practice of the Europeans, or rather I mean of the Europeans settled in the east and commonly called Levantines. When I came to the end of my journey over the desert I had been so long alone that the prospect of speaking to somebody at Cairo seemed almost a new excitement. I felt a sort of consciousness that I had a little of the wild beast about me, but I was quite in the humour to be charmingly tame and to be quite engaging in my manners if I should have an opportunity of holding communion with any of the human race whilst at Cairo. I knew no one in the place and had no letters of introduction, but I carried letters of credit and it often happens in places remote from England that those advices operate as a sort of introduction and obtain for the bearer, if disposed to receive them, such ordinary civilities as it may be in the power of the banker to offer. Very soon after my arrival I went to the house of the Levantine to whom my credentials were addressed. At his door several persons, all Arabs, were hanging about and keeping guard. It was not till after some delay and the passing of some communications with those in the interior of the citadel that I was admitted. At length, however, I was conducted through the court and up a flight of stairs and finally into the apartment where business was transacted. The room was divided by an excellent substantial fence of iron bars and behind this grill the banker had a station. The truth was that from fear of the plague he had adopted the course usually taken by European residents and had shut himself up in strict quarantine, that is to say that he had as he hoped cut himself off from all communication with infecting substances. The Europeans, long resident in the East, without any or with scarcely any exception, are firmly convinced that the plague is propagated by contact and by contact only, that if they can better avoid the touch of an infecting substance they are safe and that if they cannot they die. This belief induces them to adopt the contrivance of putting themselves in that state of siege which they call quarantine. It is a part of their faith that metals and hemp and rope and also i-fancy one or two other substances will not carry the infection and they likewise believe that the germ of pestilence which lies in an infected substance may be destroyed by submersion in water or by the action of smoke. They therefore guard the doors of their houses with the utmost care against intrusion and condemn themselves with all the members of their family including any European servants to a strict imprisonment within the walls of their dwelling. Their native attendants are not allowed to enter at all but they make the necessary purges of provisions which are holed up through one of the windows by means of a rope and are then soaked in water. I knew nothing of these mysteries and was not there for prepared for the sort of reception which I met with. I advanced to the iron fence and putting my letter between the bars politely profited to Mr. Banker. Mr. Banker received me with a sad and rejected look and not with open arms or with any arms at all but with a pair of tongs. I placed my letter between the iron fingers which picked it up as if it were a viper and conveyed it away to be scorched and purified by fire and smoke. I was disgusted at this reception and had the idea that anything of mine could carry infection to the poor wretch who stood on the other side of the grill, pale and trembling, and already meet for death. I looked with something of the Mohammedan's feeling upon these little contrivances for alluding fate and in this instance at least they were vain. A few more days and the poor money changer who had striven to guard the days of his life as though they were coins with bolts and bars of iron, he was seized by the plague and he died. To people entertaining such opinions as these respecting the fateful effect of contact, the narrow and crowded streets of Cairo were terrible as the easy slope that leads to Avernus. The roaring ocean and the beatling crags owe something of their sublimity to this, that if they be tempted they can take the warm life of a man. To the contagionist, fill as he is with the dread of final causes, having no faith in destiny nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the devil may care and difference which might stand him instead of creeds. To such one every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of sublimity. If by any terrible ordinance he be forced to avenge your forth, he sees death dangling from every sleeve, and as he creeps forward he poises his shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right elbow and the murderous police that threatens to mow him clean down as it sweeps along on his left. But most of all he dreads that which most of all he should love, the touch of a woman's dress. For mothers and wives hurrying forth on kindly errands from the bed-sides of the dying, goes slouching along through the streets more wilfully and less courageously than the men. For a while it may be that the caution of the poor Leventine may enable him to avoid contact, but sooner or later perhaps the dreaded chance arrives. That bundle of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top of it, that labours along with a voluptuous clumsiness of grizzy, she has touched the poor Leventine with the hem of her sleeve. From that dread moment his peace is gone. His mind, forever hanging upon the fatal touch, invites the blow which he fears. He watches for the symptoms of plague so carefully that sooner or later they come in truth. The parched mouth is a sign, his mouth is parched, the throbbing brain. His brain thus throb, the rapid pulse. He touches his own wrist, for he dares not ask counsel of any man lest he be deserted. He touches his wrist, and feels how his frightened blood goes galloping out of his heart. There is nothing but the fatal swelling that is wanting to make a sad conviction complete. Immediately he has an odd feel on the yarn. No pain, but a little straining of the skin. He would to God it were his fancy that were strong enough to give him that sensation. This is the worst of all. It now seems to him that he could be happy and contented with his parched mouth and his throbbing brain and his rapid pulse if only he could know that there were no swelling under the left arm. But there he try. In a moment of calmness and deliberation he dares not, but when for a while he has writhed under the torture of suspense a sudden strength of will drives him to seek and know his fate. He touches the gland, and finds the skin sane and sound, but under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a pistol bullet that moves as he pushes it. Oh, but is this for all certainty? Is this the sentence of death? Feel the gland of the other arm. There is not the same lump exactly, yet something a little like it. Have not some people glands naturally enlarged? What to heaven he were one? So he does for himself the work of the plague, and when the angel of death thus quoted does indeed and in truth come, he has only to finish that which has been so well begun. He passes his fury hand over the brain of the victim, and lets him rave for a season, but all chance-wise of people and things once dear, or of people and things indifferent. Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and sees the sundial that stood in his childhood's garden, sees part of his mother, and the long since forgotten face of that little dead sister. He sees her, he says, on a Sunday morning for all the church bells are ringing. He looks up and down through the universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton, and cotton eternal. So much so that he feels, he knows, he swears he could make that winning hazard if the billiard-table would not sland upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with. But it is not. It's a cue that won't move, his own arm won't move. In short, there's that devil to pay in the brain of the poor Levantine, and perhaps the next night but one, he becomes the life and the soul of some squalling dackel family, who fish him out by the foot from a shallow and sandy grave. Better fate was mine. By some happy Provence-ness, occasion perhaps by my disgust at the notion of being received of the pair of tongs, I took it into my pleasant head that all the European notions about contagion were thoroughly unfounded, that the plague might be providential or epidemic, as they phrase it, but it was not contagious, and that I could not be killed by the touch of a one's sleeve nor yet by a blessed breath. I therefore determined that the plague should not alter my habits and amusements in any one respect. Though I came to this resolve from impulse, I think that I took the cause which was in effect the most prudent, for the cheerfulness of spirits which I was thus unable to retain, discouraged the yellow-winged angel, and prevented him from taking a shell at me. I, however, so far respected the opinion of the Europeans that I avoided touching when I could do so without privation or inconvenience. This endeavour furnished me with this sort of amusement as I passed through the streets. The usual mode of moving from place to place in the city of Cairo is upon donkeys, of which great numbers are always in readiness, with donkey-boys attached. I had two who constantly, until one of them died at the plague, waited at my door upon the chance of being wanted. I found this way of moving about exceedingly pleasant and never attempted any other. I'd only to mount my beast and tell my donkey-boy the point for which I was bound, and instantly I began to glide on at a capital pace. The streets of Cairo are not paved in any way, but strewed with a dry, sandy soil, so deadening to sound that the footfall of my donkey could scarcely be heard. There is no tort vare, and as you ride through the streets you mingle with the people on foot. Those who are on your way, upon being warned by the shouts of the donkey, move very slightly aside, so as to leave you a narrow lane through which you pass at a gallop. In this way you glide on delightfully in the very midst of crowds, without being inconvenienced or stopped for a moment. It seems to you that it's not the donkey, but the donkey-boy who wafts you on with his shouts, through pleasant groups, and air that feels thick with the fragrance of burial spies. Eh, shak, eh, bint, regalak, schumalak, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, old man, oh, virgin, get out of the way on the right. Oh, virgin, oh, old man, get out of the way on the left. This Englishman comes. He comes. The narrow alley which these shouts cleared for my passage made it possible, though difficult, to go on for a long way without touching a single person, and my endeavours to avoid such contact were a sort of game for me and my loneliness, which was not without interest. If I got through a street without being touched, I won. If I was touched, I lost. Lost at use of stake, according to the theory of the Europeans, but that I deemed to be all nonsense. I only lost that game, and would certainly win the next. There is not much in the way of public buildings to admire at Cairo, but I saw one handsome mosque to which an instructive history is attached. A Hindustani merchant, having amassed an immense fortune, settled in Cairo, and soon found that his riches in the dense state of the political world gave him vast power in the city. Power, however, the exercise of which was much restrained by the counteracting influence of other wealthy man. With a view to extinguish every attempt at rivalry, the Hindustani merchant built this magnificent mosque at his own expense. When the work was complete, he invited all the leading men of the city to join him in prayer within the walls of the newly built temple, and he then caused to be massacred all those who were sufficiently influential to cause him any jealousy or uneasiness, ensured all the respectable men of the place. After this he possessed undisputed power in the city and was greatly revered. He is revered to this day. It seemed to me that there was a touching simplicity in the mode which this man so successfully adopted for gaining the confidence and goodwill of his fellow citizens. There seems to be some improbability in the story, though not nearly so gross as it might appear to a European, ignorant of the East, for witness Mohammed Ali's destruction of the Mamluks, a closely similar act and attended with a like brilliant success. But even if the story be false as a mere fact, it is perfectly true as an illustration. It is a true exposition of the means by which the respect and affection of orientals may be conciliated. I ascended one day to the citadel, which commands a superb view of the town. The fanciful and elaborate guildwork of the many minerates gives a light and florid grace to the city as seen from this height, but before you can look for many seconds at such things your eyes are drawn westward, drawn westward and over the Nile, till they rest upon the massive enormities of the Gize pyramids. I saw within the fortress many yoke of men, all haggard and woe be gone, and a kennel of very fine lions, well fed and flourishing. I say yoke of men, for the poor fellows were working together in bonds. I say a kennel of lions, for the beasts were not enclosed in cages, but simply chained up like dogs. I went round the bazaars. It seemed to me that pipes and arms were cheaper here than at Constantinople, and I should advise you, therefore, if you go to both places, to prefer the market of Cairo. I had previously bought several of such things at Constantinople, and did not choose to encumber myself, or, to speak more honestly, I did not choose to disencomber my purse by making any more purchases. In the open slave market I saw about fifty girls exposed for sale, but all of them black, or invisible brown. A slave agent took me to some rooms in the upper story of the building, and also into several obscure houses in the neighborhood, with a view to show me some white women. The owners raised various objections to the display of their weah, and, well, they might, for I had not the least notion of purchasing. Some refused, on account of the illegality of the proceeding, and others declared that all transactions of this sort were completely out of the question as long as the plague was raging. I only succeeded in seeing one white slave who was for sale, but on this one the owner affected to set an immense value, and raised my expectations to a high pitch by saying that the girl was Circassian and was fair as the full moon. After a good deal of delay I was at last led into a room, at the farther end of which was that mass of white linen which indicates an eastern woman. She was bit to uncover her face, and I presently saw that, though very far from being good-looking, according to my notion of beauty, she had not been ineptly described by the man who compared her to the full moon, for her large face was perfectly round and perfectly white. Though very young, she was nevertheless extremely fat. She gave me the idea of having been got up for sale, of having been fattened and whitened by medicines or by some peculiar diet. I was firmly determined not to see any more of her than the face. She was perhaps disgusted that this my virtuous resolve, as well as with my personal appearance, perhaps she saw my distaste and disappointment. Perhaps she wished to gain favour with her owner by showing her attachment to his faith. At all events she hollered out very lustily and very decidedly that she would not be bought by the infertile. Whilst I remained at Cairo I thought it worthwhile to see something of the magicians, because I considered that these men were in some sort the descendants of those who contended so stoutly against the superior power of Aaron. I therefore sent for an old man who was held to be the chief of the magicians, and desired him to show me the wonders of his art. The old man looked and dressed his character exceedingly well. The vast turban, the flowing beard, and the ample robes were all that one could wish in the way of appearance. The first experiment, a very stale one, which he attempted to perform for me, was that of showing the forms and faces of my absent friends, not to me, but to a boy brought in from the streets for the purpose, and set to be chosen at random. A man-gale, pen of burning charcoal, was brought into my room, and the magician, bending over it, sprinkled upon the fire some substances, which must have consisted partly of spices or sweetly burning woods, for immediately a fragrant smoke arose that curled around the bending form of the wizard, the while that he pronounced his first incantations. When these were over the boy was made to sit down, and a common green shade was bound over his brow. Then the wizard took ink, and still continuing his incantations, wrote certain mysterious figures upon the boy's palm, and directed him to rivet his attention to these marks without looking aside for an instant. Again the incantations proceeded, and after a while the boy, being seemingly a little agitated, was asked whether he saw anything on the palm of his hand. He declared that he saw a kind of military procession, with flags and banners, which he described rather minutely. I was then called upon to name the absent person whose form was to be made visible. I named Keat. You were not eaten, and I must tell you therefore what manner of man it was that I named, though I think you must have some idea of him already, for wherever from utmost Canada to Bundokund, wherever there was the whitewashed wall of an office's room, or of any other apartment in which English gentlemen are forced to kick their heels. There, likely enough, in the days of his reign, the head of Keat would be seen scratched or drawn with those various degrees of skill which one observes in the representations of saints. Anybody without the least notion of drawing could still draw a speaking, nice, cold-ing likeness of Keat. If you had no pencil you could draw him well enough with a poker, or the leg of a chair, or the smoke of a candle. He was little more, if more at all, than five feet in height, and was not very great in girth, but in this space was concentrated the pluck of ten battalions. He had a really noble voice which could modulate with great skill, but he had also the power of quacking like an angry duck, and he almost always adopted this mode of communication in order to inspire respect. He was a capital scholar, but his ingenious learning had not softened his manners, and had permitted them to be fears, tremendously fears. He had the most complete command over his temper, I mean over his good temper, which he scarcely ever allowed to appear. You could not put him out of humour, that is, out of the ill-humour which he thought to be fitting for a headmaster. His red, shaggy eyebrows were so prominent that he habitually used them as arms and hands for the purpose of pointing out any object towards which he wished to direct attention. The rest of his features were equally striking in their way, and were all and all his own. He wore a fancy dress partly resembling the costume of Napoleon and partly that of a wither woman. I could not, by any possibility, have named anybody more decidedly differing in appearance from the rest of the human race. Whom do you name? I name John Keat. Now, what do you see? said the wizard to the boy. I see, answered the boy, I see a fair girl with golden hair, blue eyes, pallet face, rosy lips. There was a shot. I shouted out my laughter to the horror of the wizard, who perceiving the grossness of his failure declared that the boy must have known sin, for none but the innocent can see truth, and accordingly kicked him downstairs. One or two other boys were tried, but none could see truth. They all made sadly bad shots. Notwithstanding the failure of these experiments I wish to see what sort of memory my magician would practice if I called upon him to show me some performances of a higher order than those which had been attempted. I therefore entered into a treaty with him, in virtue of which he was to descend with me into the tombs near the pyramids, and there evoked the devil. The negotiation lasted some time, for Temetri, as in duty bound, tried to beat down the wizard as much as he could, and the wizard on his part manfully stuck up for his prize, declaring that to raise the devil was really no joke and insinuating that to do so was an awesome crime. I let Temetri have his way in the negotiation, but I felt, in the reality, very indifferent about the sum to be paid, and for this reason, namely, that the payment, except a very small present which I might make or not, as I chose, was to be contingent on success. At length the bargain was made, and it was arranged that after a few days to be allowed for preparation the wizard should raise the devil for two pounds ten, play or pay. No devil, no piastras. The wizard failed to keep his appointment. I sent to know why the juicy had not come to raise the devil. The truth was that my Muhammad had gone to the mountain. The plague had seized him, and he died. Although the plague had now spread terrible havoc around me, I did not see very plainly any corresponding change in the looks of the streets until the seventh day after my arrival. I then first observed that the city was silenced. There were no outward signs of despair nor of violent terror, but many of the voices that had swelled the busy hum of men were already hushed in death, and the survivors, so used to scream and screech in their earnestness whenever they bought or sold, now showed an unwanted indifference about the affairs of this world. It was less worthwhile for men to haggle and haggle, and crack the sky with noisy bargains when the great commander was there, who could pay all their debts with the role of his drum. At this time I was informed that of twenty-five thousand people at Alexandria, twelve thousand had died already. The destroyer had come rather later to Cairo, but there was nothing of wariness in his strides. The deaths came faster than ever they befell in the plague of London, but the calmness of orientals under such visitations, and the habit of using beers for interment instead of burying coffins along with the bodies, ran that it practicable to dispose of the dead in the usual way, without shocking the people by any unaccustomed spectacle of horror. There was no tumbling of bodies into cards as in the plague of Florence and the plague of London. Every man, according to his station, was properly buried, and that in the usual way, except that he went to his grave in a more hurried pace that might have been adopted under ordinary circumstances. The funerals which poured through the streets were not the only public evidence of deaths. In Cairo this custom prevails. At the instant of a man's death, if his property is sufficient to justify the expense, professional howlers are employed. I believe that these persons are brought near to the dying man when his end appears to be approaching, and the moment that life is gone they lift up their voices and send forth a loud wail from the chamber of death. Thus I knew when my near neighbours died. Since the howls were near, sometimes more distant. Once I was awakened in the night by the wail of death in the next house, and another time by a like howl from the house opposite, and there were two or three minutes I recollect during which the howl seemed to be actually running along the street. I happened to be rather teased at this time by a sore throat, and I thought it would be well to get it cured if I could before I again started on my travels. I therefore inquired for a frank doctor, and it was informed that the only one then at Cairo was a young Bollinger's refugee, who was so poor that he had not been able to take flight as the other medical man had done. At such a time as this it was out of the question to send for a European physician. A person thus summoned would be sure to suppose that the patient was ill with the plague and would decline to come. I therefore wrote to the young doctor's residence. After experiencing some little difficulty in finding where to look for him, I ascended a flight or two of stairs and knocked at his door. No one came immediately, but after some little delay the medical himself opened the door and admitted me. I of course made him understand that I had come to consult him, but before entering upon my throat grievance I accepted a chair and exchanged a sentence or two of commonplace conversation. Now the natural commonplace of the city at this season was of a gloomy sort. Come, I valapeste. How goes the plague? And this was precisely the question I put. A deep sigh and the words, set a gentle pageant, no signeur, seven hundred a day, pronounced in a tone of the deepest sadness and dejection where the answer I received. The day was not oppressively hot, yet I saw that the doctor was perspying profusely, and even the outside service of the thick shawl dressing-gown in which he had wrapped himself appeared to be moist. He was a handsome, pleasant-looking young fellow, but the deep melancholy of his tone did not tempt me to prolong the conversation, and without further delay I requested that my throat might be looked at. The medico held my chin in the usual way and examined my throat. He then wrote me a prescription, and almost immediately afterwards I bade him farewell. But as he conducted me towards the door I observed an expression of strange and unhappy watchfulness in his rolling eyes. It was not the next day, but the next day but one, if I rightly remember, that I sent to request another interview with my doctor. In due time, Tometri, who was my messenger, returned, looking sadly aghast. He had met the medico, for so he phrased it, coming out from his house, in a beer. It was, of course, plain that when the poor Bolling Yeas was looking at my throat, and almost mingling his breath with mine, he was stricken of the plague. I suppose that the violent sweat in which I found him had been produced by some medicine, which he must have taken in the hope of curing himself. The peculiar rolling of the eyes, which I had remarked, is, I believe, to experienced observers a pretty sure test of plague. Russian acquaintance of mine, speaking from the information of men who had made the Turkish campaigns of 1828 and 1829, told me that by this sign the officers of Sabalkansky's force were able to make out the plague-stricken soldiers with a good deal of certainty. It so happened that most of the people with whom I had anything to do during my stay at Cairo were seized with plague, and all these died. Since I had been for a long time en route before I reached Egypt, and was about to start again for another long journey of the desert, there were, of course, many little matters touching my wardrobe and my travelling equipments which required to be attended to whilst I remained in the city. It happened so many times that Tometri's orders in respect to these matters were frustrated by the death of the tradespeople and others whom he employed, that at last I became quite accustomed to the peculiar manner which he assumed when he prepared to announce a new death to me. The poor fellow naturally supposed that I should feel some uneasiness at hearing of the accidents which happened to persons employed by me, and he therefore communicated their deaths as though they were the deaths of friends. He would cast down his eyes and look like a man abashed, and then gently, and with a mournful gesture, allow the words Morte, Signore, to come through his lips. I don't know how many of such instances occurred, but they were several, and besides these, as I told you before, my banker, my doctor, my landlord, and my magician all died at the plague. A lad who acted as a helper in the house which I occupied lost a brother and a sister within a few hours. Out of my two established donkey-boys, one died. I did not hear of any instance in which a plague-stricken patient had recovered. Going out one morning I met unexpectedly the scorching breath of the comes-in wind, and fearing that I should faint under the horrible sensations which it caused, I returned to my rooms, reflecting, however, that I might have to encounter this wind in the desert, where there would be no possibility of avoiding it, I thought it would be better to brave it once more in the city, and to try whether I could really bear it or not. I therefore mounted my ass and rode to Old Cairo and along the gardens by the banks of the Nile. The wind was hot to the touch, as though it came from a furnace. It blew strongly, but yet with such perfect steadiness that the trees bending under its falls remained fixed in the same curves without perceptibly waving. The whole sky was obscured by a veil of yellowish gray that shut out in the face of the sun. The streets were utterly silent, being indeed almost entirely deserted, and not without cause, for the scorching blast whilst it fevers the blood closes up the pores of the skin, and is terribly distressing therefore to every animal that encounters it. I returned to my rooms dreadfully ill, my head ached with a burning pain, and my pulse bounded quick and fitfully, but perhaps, as in the instance of the poor Leventine whose death I was mentioning, the fear and excitement which I felt in trying my own wrist may have made my blood fluttered the faster. It is a thoroughly well-believed theory that during the continuance of the plague you can't be ill of any other febrile melody, an unpleasant privilege that, for ill I was, and ill of fever, and I anxiously wished that the ailment might turn out to be anything rather than plague. I had some right to surmise that my illness may have been merely the effect of the hot wind, and this notion was encouraged by the elasticity of my spirits, and by a strong forefeeling that much of my destined life in this world was yet to come and yet to be fulfilled. That was my instinctive belief, but when I carefully weighed the probabilities on the one side and on the other, I could not help seeing that the strength of argument was all against me. There was a strong antecedent likelihood in favour of my being struck by the same blow as the rest of the people who had been dying around me. Besides, it occurred to me that, after all, the universal opinion of the Europeans upon a medical question, such as that of contagion, might probably be correct, and if it were, I was so thoroughly compromised, and especially by the touch and breath of the dying medico, that I had no right to expect any other fate than that which now seemed to have overtaken me. Balancing as well as I could, all the considerations which hope and fear suggested, I slowly and reluctantly came to the conclusion that, according to all merely reasonable probability, the plague had come upon me. You would suppose that this conviction would have induced me to write a few farewell lines to those who were dearest, and that, having done that, I should have turned my thoughts towards the world to come. Such, however, was not the case. I believe that the prospect of death often brings with it strong anxieties about matters of comparatively trivial import, and certainly with me the whole energy of the mind was directed towards the one petty object of concealing my illness until the latest possible moment, until the delirious stage. I did not believe that either Miserie or Tmetri, who had served me so faithfully in all trials, would have deserted me, as most Europeans are wont to do, when they knew that I was stricken by plague, but I shrank from the idea of putting them to this test, and that dreaded the consternation which the knowledge of my illness would be sure to occasion. I was very ill indeed at the moment when my dinner was served, and my soul sickened at the sight of the food, that I had luckily the habit of dispensing with the attendance of servants during my meal, and as soon as I was left alone I made a manically calculation of the quantity of food which I should have eaten if I had been in my usual health, and filled my plates accordingly, and gave myself salt and so on as though I were going to dine. I then transferred the vines to a piece of the omnipresent Times newspaper, and hit them away in a cupboard, for it was not yet night, and I dared not throw the food into the street until darkness came. I did not at all relish this process of fictitious dining, but at length the cloth was removed, and I gladly reclined on my divan, I would not lie down, with the Arabian knights in my hand. I had a feeling that tea would be a capital thing for me, but I would not order it until the usual hour. When at last the time came I drank deep draught from the fragrant cup. The effect was almost instantaneous. A plenty of sweat burst through my skin, and wadded my clothes through and through. I kept myself thickly covered. The hot, tormenting weight which had been loading my brain was slowly heaved away. The fever was extinguished. I felt a new buoyancy of spirits, and an unusual activity of mind. I went into my bed under a load of thick covering, and when the morning came, and I asked myself how I was, I found that I was thoroughly well. I was very anxious to procure, if possible, some medical advice for misery, whose illness prevented my departure. Every one of the European practicing doctors, of whom there had been many, had either died or fled. It was said, however, that there was an Englishman in the medical service at the Pasha, who quietly remained at his post, but that he never engaged in private practice. I determined to try if I could obtain assistance in this quarter. I did not venture at first, and at such a time as this, to ask him to visit a servant who was prostrate on the bed of sickness, but thinking that I might thus gain an opportunity of persuading him to attend misery, I wrote a note mentioning my own affair of the sore throat, and asking for the benefit of his medical advice. He instantly followed back my messenger, and was at once shown up into my room. I entreated him to stand off, telling him fairly how deeply I was compromised, and especially by my contact with a person actually ill and since dead of plague. The generous fellow, with a good humoured laugh at the terrors of the contagionists, marched straight up to me, and forcibly seized my hand and shook it with manly violence. I felt grateful indeed, and swelled with fresh pride of race because that my countrymen could carry himself so nobly. He soon cured misery as well as me, and all this he did from no other motives than the pleasure of doing a kindness and the delight of braving a danger. At length the great difficulty which I had had in procuring beasts from my departure was overcome, and now, too, I was to have the new excitement of travelling on dromedaries. With two of these beasts and three camels I gladly wand my way from out of the pest-stricken city. As I passed through the streets I observed a fanatical looking elder who stretched forth his arms, and lifted up his voice in a speech which seemed to have some reference to me. Requiring an interpretation I found that the man had said, The pasha seeks camels, and he finds them not. The Englishman says, Let camels be brought, and, behold, there they are. I know sooner breathed the free, wholesome air of the desert, than I felt that a great burden, which had been scarcely conscious of bearing, was lifted away from my mind. For nearly three weeks I had lifted the peril of death. The peril seized, and not till then that I know how much alarm and anxiety I had really been suffering. CHAPTER XIX I went to see and to explore the pyramids. Familiar to one from the days of early childhood are the forms of the Egyptian pyramids, and now, as I approached them from the banks of the Nile, I had no print, no picture before me, and yet the old shapes were there, there was no change, they were just as I had always known them. I straightened myself in my stirrups, and strived to persuade my understanding that this was real Egypt, and that those angles which stood up between me and the West were of harder stuff, and more ancient than the paper pyramids of the Green Portfolio. But it was not till I came to the base of the Great Pyramid that reality began to weigh upon my mind. Strange to say, the bigness of the distinct blocks of stone was the first sign by which I attained to feel the immensity of the whole pile. When I came and trod and touched with my hands, and climbed in order that by climbing I might come to the top of one single stone, then, and almost suddenly, a cold sense and understanding of the pyramid's enormity came down, overcasting my brain. Now, try to endure this homely, sick-nurseous illustration of the effect produced upon one's mind by the mere vastness of the Great Pyramid. When I was very young, between the ages I believe of three and five years old, being then of delicate health, I was often in time of night the victim of a strange kind of mental oppression. I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open eyes, but without power to speak or move, and all the while my brain was oppressed to distraction by the presence of a single and abstract idea, the idea of solid immensity. It seemed to me in my agonies that the horror of this visitation arose from its coming upon me without form or shape, that the close presence of the direst monster ever bred in hell would have been a thousand times more tolerable than the simple idea of solid size. My aching mind was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness, vastness, vastness, and was not permitted to invest it with any particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I could not, of course, in those days, knowing no verbal metaphysics and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an abstract idea, I could not, of course, find words to describe the nature of my sensations, and even now I cannot explain why it is that the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from matter, should be so terrible. Well, now my eyes saw anew, and my hands and my feet informed my understanding that there was nothing at all abstract about the great pyramid. It was a big triangle, sufficiently concrete, easy to see and rough to the touch. It could not, of course, affect me with the peculiar sensation which I have been talking of. But yet there was something akin to that old nightmare agony in the terrible completeness with which a mere mass of masonry could fill and load my mind. And time, too. The remoteness of its origin, no less than the enormity of its proportions, screens an Egyptian pyramid from the easy and familiar contact of our modern minds. At its base the common earth ends, and above all is a world, not one created of God, not seeming to be made by men's hands, but rather the sheer giant work of some old dismal age weighing down this younger planet. Fine sayings, but the truth seems to be, after all, that the pyramids are quite of this world, that they were piled up into the air for the realization of some kingly crotchets about immortality, some priestly longing for burial fees, and that, as for the building, they were built like coral rocks by swarms of insects, by swarms of poor Egyptians, who were not only the abject tools and slaves of power, but who also ate onions for the reward of their mortal labors. The pyramids are quite of this world. I of course ascended to the summit of the Great Pyramid, and also explored its chambers, but these I need not describe. The first time that I went to the pyramids of Giza there were a number of Arabs hanging about in its neighborhood and wanting to receive presence on various pretenses. Their shake was with them. There was also present an ill-looking fellow in a soldier's uniform. This man on my departure claimed a reward on the ground that he had maintained order and decorum amongst the Arabs. His claim was not considered valid by my drago-man, and was rejected accordingly. My donkey-boys afterwards said they had overheard this fellow propose to the shake to put me to death whilst I was in the interior of the Great Pyramid, and to share with him the booty. Fancy, a struggle for life in one of those burial chambers, with acres and acres of solid masonry between one's self and the daylight. I felt exceedingly glad that I had not made the rascal a present. I visited the very ancient pyramids of Abukir and Sakara. There are many of these, and of various shapes and sizes, and it struck me that, taken together, they might be considered as showing the progress and perfection, such as it is, of pyramidical architecture. One of the pyramids at Sakara is almost a rival for the full-grown monster at Giza. Others are scarcely more than vast heaps of brick and stone. His last suggested to me the idea that, after all, the pyramid is nothing more or less than a variety of the sepulcher mound so common in most countries, including, I believe, Hindustan, from whence the Egyptians are supposed to have come. Man accustomed to raise these structures for their dead kings or conquerors would carry the usage with them in their migrations. But arriving in Egypt and seeing the impossibility of finding earth sufficiently tenacious for a mound, they would approximate as nearly as might be to their ancient custom by raising up a round heap of stones. In short, conical pyramids. Of these there are several at Sakara, and the materials of some are thrown together without any order or regularity. The transition from this simple form to that of the square angular pyramid was easy and natural, and it seemed to me that the gradations through which the style passed from emphasy up to its mature enormity could be plainly traced at Sakara. CHAPTER XXII The Sphinx And near the pyramids, more wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphinx. Cummly the creature is, but the cummliness is not of this world. The once worshipped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation, and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient mold of beauty. Some mold of beauty now forgotten. Forgotten because that Greece drew forth Scytheria from the flashing foam of the Aegean, and in her image created new forms of beauty, and made it a law among men, that the short and proudly wreathed lips should stand for the sign and the main condition of loveliness through all generations to come. Yet still there lives on the race of those who were beautiful in the fashion of the elder world, and Christian girls of Coptic blood will look on you with the sad, serious gaze and kiss your charitable hand with the big, pouting lips of the very Sphinx. Laugh and mock, if you will, at the worship of stone idols, but mark ye this, ye breakers of images, that in one regard the stone idol bears an awful semblance of deity, unchangedfulness in the midst of change, the same seeming will, and intent forever, and ever inexorable. Upon ancient dynasties of Ethiopian and Egyptian kings, upon Greek and Roman, upon Arab and Ottoman conquerors, upon Napoleon dreaming of an eastern empire, upon battle and pestilence, upon the ceaseless misery of the Egyptian race, upon keen-eyed travelers, Herodotus yesterday and Warburton today, upon all and more this unworldly Sphinx has watched, and watched like a providence with the same earnest eyes, and the same sad, tranquil mean. And we, we shall die, and Islam will wither away, and the Englishmen, leaning far over to hold his loved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and sit in the seats of the faithful, and still that sleepless rock will lie watching, and watching the works of the new, busy race with those same sad, earnest eyes, and the same tranquil mean everlasting. You dare not mock at the Sphinx. CHAPTER XXI The dromedary of Egypt and Syria is not the two-humped animal described by that name in books of natural history, but is, in fact, of the same family as the camel, to which it stands in about the same relation as a racer to a cart-horse. The fleetness and endurance of this creature are extraordinary. It is not usual to force him into a gallop, and I fancy from his make that it would be quite impossible for him to maintain that pace for any length of time. But the animal is on so large a scale, that the jog-trod at which he is generally ridden implies a progress of perhaps ten or twelve miles an hour, and this pace it is said he can keep up incessantly, without food or water or rest, for three whole days and nights. Of the two dromedaries which I had obtained for this journey I mounted one myself and put the Thymitri on the other. My plan was to ride on with the Thymitri to Suez as rapidly as the fleetness of the beast would allow, and to let Messiri, who was still weak from the effects of his late illness, to come quietly on with the camels and baggage. The trot of the dromedary is a pace terribly disagreeable to the rider, until he becomes a little accustomed to it, but after the first half hour I so far schooled myself to this new exercise that I felt capable of keeping it up, though not without aching limbs for several hours together. Now therefore I was anxious to dart forward and annihilate it once the whole space that divided me from the Red Sea. The Thymitri, however, could not get on at all. Three attempts which he made to trot seemed to threaten the utter dislocation of his whole frame, and indeed I doubt whether any one of Dithymitri's age, nearly forty, I think, and unaccustomed to such exercise, could have borne it at all easily. Besides, the dromedary which felt to his lot was evidently a very bad one. He every now and then came to a dead stop and coolly knelt down as though suggesting that the rider had better get off at once, and abandoned the attempt as one that was utterly hopeless. When for the third or fourth time I saw Dithymitri thus planted, I lost my patience and went on without him. For about two hours I think I advanced without once looking behind me. I then paused and cast my eyes back to the western horizon. There was no sign of Dithymitri nor of any other living creature. This I expected, for I knew that I must have far out distanced all my followers. I had ridden away from my party merely by way of gratifying my impatience, and with the intention of stopping as soon as I felt tired, unless I was overtaken. I now observed, however, this I had not been able to do whilst advancing so rapidly, that the track which I had been following was seemingly the track of only one or two camels. I did not fear that I had diverged very largely from the true route, but still I could not feel any reasonable certainty that my party would follow any line of march within sight of me. I had to consider therefore whether I should remain where I was upon the chance of seeing my people come up, or whether I should push on alone and find my way to Suez. I had now learned that I could not rely upon the continued guidance of any track, but I knew that, if maps were right, the point for which I was bound was just due east of Cairo, and I thought that, although I might miss the line leading most directly to Suez, I could not well fail to find my way sooner or later to the Red Sea. The worst of it was that I had no provision of food or water with me, and already I was beginning to feel thirst. I deliberated for a minute, and then determined that I would abandon all hope of seeing my party again, in the desert, and would push as rapidly as possible towards Suez. It was not, I confess, without a sensation of awe that I swept with my sight the vacant round of the horizon, and remembered that I was all alone and unprovisioned in the midst of the arid waste. But this very awe gave tone and zest to the exultation with which I felt myself launched. Hitherto in all my wandering I had been under the care of other people. Sailors, Tartars, Guides, and Dragoomans had watched over my welfare. But now at last I was here in this African desert, and I myself and no other had charge of my life. I liked the office well. I had the greatest part of the day before me, a very fair dromedary, a fur police, and abrasive pistols, but no bread and no water. For that I must ride, and ride I did. For several hours I urged forward my beast at a rapid, though steady pace, but now the pangs of thirst began to torment me. I did not relax my pace, however, and I had not suffered long when a moving object appeared in the distance before me. The intervening space was soon traversed, and I found myself approaching a Bedouin Arab mounted on a camel, attended by another Bedouin on foot. They stopped. I saw that, as usual, there hung from the pack-saddle of the camel a large-skinned water-flask, which seemed to be well filled. I steered my dromedary close up alongside of the mounted Bedouin, caused my beast to kneel down, then alighted, and keeping the end of the halter in my hand, I went up to the mounted Bedouin without speaking, took hold of his water-flask, opened it, and drank long and deep from its leatheren lips. Both of the Bedouins stood fast in amazement and mute horror, and really, if they had never happened to see a European before, the apparition was enough to startle them. To see for the first time a coat and a waistcoat, with the semblance of a white human head at the top, and for this ghastly figure to come swiftly out of the horizon upon a fleet dromedary, approached them silently and with a demonical smile, and drink a deep draught from their water-flask, this was enough to make the Bedouin stare a little. They in fact stared a great deal, not as Europeans stare, with a restless and puzzled expression of countenance, but with features all fixed and rigid, and with still, glassy eyes. Before they had time to get decomposed from their state of petrification I had remounted my dromedary, and was darting away towards the east. Without pause or remission of pace I continued to press forward, but after a while I found to my confusion that the slight-track which hitherto guided me now failed altogether. I began to fear that I must have been all along following the course of some wandering Bedouins, and I felt that if this were the case my fate was a little uncertain. I had no compass with me, but I determined upon the eastern point of the horizon as accurately as I could by reference to the sun, and so laid down for myself away over the pathless sands. But now my poor dromedary, by whose life and strength I held my own, began to show signs of distress, a thick, clammy and glutinous kind of foam gathered about her lips, and piteous sobs burst forth from her bosom in the tomes of human misery. I doubted for a moment whether I would give her a little rest, a relaxation of pace, but I decided that I would not, and continued to push forward as steadily as before. The character of the country became changed. I had ridden away from the level tracks, and before me now on either side there were vast hills of sand and calcined rocks that interrupted my progress and baffled my doubtful road, but I did my best. With rapid steps I swept round the base of the hills, threaded the winding hollows, and at last, as I rose in my swift course to the crest of a lofty ridge, Thelata, Thelata, by Jove I saw the sea. My tongue can tell where to find a clue to many an old pagan creed, because that, distinctly from all mere imagination of the beauty belonging to nature's works, I acknowledge a sense of mystical reverence when I first look to see some illustrious feature of the globe, some coastline of ocean, some mighty river or dreary mountain range, the ancient barrier of kingdoms. But the red sea! It might well claim my earnest gaze by force of the great Jewish migration which connects it with the history of our own religion. From this very ridge, it is likely enough, the panting Israelites first saw that shining inlet of the sea. I, I, but moreover, and best of all, that beckoning sea assured my eyes, and proved how well I had marked out the east from my path, and gave me good promise that sooner or later the time would come for me to rest and drink. It was distant, the sea, but I felt my own strength, and I had heard of the strength of dromedaries. I pushed forward as eagerly as though I had spoiled the Egyptians and were flying from Pharaoh's police. I had not yet been able to discover any symptoms of Suez, but after a while I described in the distance a large, blank, isolated building. I made towards this and in time got down to it. The building was a fort, and had been built there for the protection of a well which it contained within its precincts. A cluster of small huts adhered to the fort, and in a short time I was receiving the hospitality of the inhabitants who were grouped upon the sands near their hamlet. To quench the fires of my throat with about a gallon of muddy water and to swallow a little of the food placed before me was the work of a few minutes, and before the astonishment of my host had even begun to subside I was pursuing my onward journey. Suez, I found, was still three hours distant, and the sun going down in the west warned me that I must find some other guide to keep me in the right direction. This guide I found in the most fickle and uncertain of the elements. For some hours the wind had been freshening, and now it blew a violent gale. It blew not fitfully in ensqualls, but with such remarkable steadiness that I felt convinced it would blow from the same quarter for several hours. When the sun set, therefore, I carefully looked for the point from which the wind was blowing, and found that it came from the very west, and was blowing exactly in the direction of my route. I had nothing to do, therefore, but to go straight to leeward, and this was not difficult, for the gale blew with such immense force that if I diverged at all from its line I instantly felt the pressure of the blast on the side towards which I was deviating. Very soon after sunset there came on complete darkness, but the strong wind guided me well, and sped me, too, on my way. I had pushed on for about, I think, a couple of hours after nightfall when I saw the glimmer of a light in the distance, and this I ventured to hope must be Suez. On approaching it, however, I found that it was only a solitary fort, and I passed on without stopping. On I went, still riding down the wind, when an unlucky accident occurred, for which, if you like, you can have your laugh against me. I have told you already what sort of lodging it is that you have upon the back of a camel. You ride the dromedary in the same fashion. You are perched, rather than seated, on a bunch of carpets or quilts upon the summit of the hump. It happened that my dromedary veered rather suddenly from her onward course. Meeting the movement I mechanically turned my left wrist as though I were holding a bridal rain, for the complete darkness prevented my eyes from reminding me that I had nothing but a halter in my hand. The expected resistance failed, for the halter was hanging upon that side of the dromedary's neck towards which I was slightly leaning. I toppled over, head foremost, and then went falling and falling through air, till my crown came whang against the ground. And the ground, too, was perfectly hard, compacted sand, but the thickly wadded headgear which I wore for protection against the sun saved my life. The notion of my being able to get up, again, after falling head foremost from such an immense height, seemed to me at first too paradoxical to be acted upon, but I soon found that I was not a bit hurt. My dromedary utterly vanished. I looked round me and saw the glimmer of a light in the fort which I had lately passed, and began to work my way back in that direction. The violence of the gale made it hard for me to force my way towards the west, but I succeeded, at last, in regaining the fort. To this as to the other fort which I had passed there was attached a cluster of huts, and I soon found myself surrounded by a group of villainous, gloomy-looking fellows. It was a horrid bore for me to have to swagger and look big at a time when I felt so particularly small, on account of my tumble and my lost dromedary, but there was no help for it. I had no Dimitri now to strike terror for me. I knew hardly one word of Arabic, but somehow or other I contrived to announce that it was my absolute will and pleasure that these fellows should find me the means of gaining Suez. They acceded, and, having a donkey, they saddled it for me, and appointed one of their number to attend me on foot. I afterwards found that these fellows were not Arabs, but Algerine refugees, and that they bore the character of being sad scoundrels. They justified this imputation to some extent on the following day. They allowed Messiri with my baggage in the camels to pass unmolested, but an Arab lad, belonging to the party, happened to lag a little way in the rear, and him, if they were not maligned, these rascals stripped and robbed. Though indeed is the state of bandit morality when the men will allow the sleep-traveler with well-laden camels to pass in quiet, reserving their spirit of enterprise for the tattered turban of a miserable boy. I reached Suez at last. The British agent, though roused from his midnight sleep, received me in his home with the utmost kindness and hospitality. Oh, by Jove, how delightful it was to lie on fair sheets, and to dally with sleep, and to wake, and to sleep, and to wake once more for the sake of sleeping again.