THE HOTEL DU NIL.

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mane!" but our appetites were better than the food, and washing the meal down with copious draughts of a wine which tasted like writing fluid, we stretched ourselves on chairs, tables, and sofas, and sunk into a sleep which relieved the musquitoes from the smallest anxiety of interference in their assiduous labours. Wah! Wah! The waking that morning! Eyes half closed, hands, wrists, forehead, insteps, ancles, devoured, blotched, and blurred by the venomous bloodsuckers. We were awakened by a bell at 5 o'clock to announce that the train would start at 6.30. The promise of bread was not kept, for some hours at least; and, to put us all in good humour, a message was sent from the transit to say the train would not start till 9.30. Under any circumstances it was expected of us to mount donkeys and go to the Ezbekeyah, and we bowed to necessity and precedent and mounted our donkeys-some of which, if they live, must remember that morning well. The great advantage of seeing the Bazaar at this early hour is, that you can get nothing to buy, as the shops are all shut, so that you save your money, and have the fun of riding full tilt down the narrow streets, of spilling people, and getting "spilt" yourself, and of chastising donkey-boys without any outlay. The delusions which our good nature fosters abroad are very preposterous. In Cairo every inhabitant firmly believes that every Englishman wants to buy slippers, to lay in a life-long stock of latakia, to purchase pipestems, and to invest in little marble eggs, tarbooshes, and Egyptian whips, and no one will take the trouble to undeceive them.

Having contributed rather to the corroboration of

those notions, we returned to the Hotel du Nil, where we actually found bread and coffee, and made a good breakfast. Some of our fellow-passengers, greatly flea and mosquito bitten, passed a high eulogium on the rooms; but those who slept in the gardens were quite delighted with the mildness of the night, though one of them did admit he got rather uneasy at finding a hideous marble deity (which was for sale on the premises) staring at him rigidly in the moonlight, particularly when he discovered that his chairs were flanked on each side by mummy cases.

CHAPTER III.

The bazaar of Cairo.-Felicitous arrangements for passengers.— A "gentleman."-French influences.-English behaviour.— Oriental gravity.-The Desert.—Arabian Navvies.-Lost in darkness.-The Hotel at Suez.-The "American System."Picturesque dirtiness.-Arab Crafts and their crews.-Exhausting heat.

IF the bazaar of Cairo is still one of the most "Oriental-looking" covered ways in which commerce and trade ever slumbered and crept, the new town is most distressingly European in spite of donkey-boys, palms, and cypresses, and groups of women with the yachmak. Tall gaunt French and Italian looking houses, seem staring at each other over partitions and garden walls, as if in surprise at finding themselves in such a place. The junction between the two is as ill assorted as a Paisley fringe to a Cashmere shawl. It is just what one sees where the adjuncts of civilization are forced upon semibarbarous countries and societies. Once, I saw, in Russia, a man flogging a serf, who was fastened by cords to an electric telegraph post. In India, the wild beasts and monkeys destroy or play upon the wires, which are perhaps recording at the time a minute on education, or conveying an order to Calcutta for some new music. Thus, in Egypt to-day, I beheld the "old ship of the desert," stalking by the side of the locomotive, till the track diverged from the railway to some remote oasis across the desert. The rail is a great, but by no

means a rapid civilizer. Just hear what happened last night. The Indian homeward mail had arrived at Cairo. With the felicity of arrangement, on which I have already complimented the administration, the passengers were at once hurried on to Cairo, where there were no places for any one to sleep. They were turned adrift in the streets of Cairo, at four o'clock in the morning. Some poor ladies made their way to the railway station, and there they laid down to stretch their weary limbs. A "gentleman," who spoke English, saw them-the man in authority. He, according to my informant, at once gave orders that these ladies-poor Indian refugees-should be put out on the stone steps of the station; or at least turned out of their poor shelter. This gentleman rejoices in the name of Ramseen Effendi. Although these people are on the highway between India and England, they either were very ignorant of events, or had made up their minds not to believe our intelligence, for a grinning Nubian, who attended at breakfast, asked if we were all going to Delhi. "Ah! you may go dere and be killed-all killed, but you never get Delhi once more." He laughed incredulously, when we told him it had fallen months ago. "All you Inglis say dat. Why your soldiers beg leave to go by desert-Why your little army all come dis way?" And be it noted, that in the room where this occurred, there were gaudy French prints of the events of the last expedition against the tribes in Algeria, and French newspapers lay on the table. Whatever may be the reason, such civilization as the East may receive promises to be French. The children of the gentry are sent to France for instruction-their polite com

ENGLISH BEHAVIOUR.

33

munications and their diplomatic communications are French-their European literature is French-their railway engineers were French, and if they could, they would get French ships, engines, carriages, and drivers. I speak this in no envious national spirit, but I regret the apathy and indifference, or whatever else it is, which deprives England of her just share of moral influence in the East. Nelson fought and Abercrombie died on the shores of Egypt, and yet they have left no trace behind them but the great cut and overflow near Damietta, whilst all the bazaars are full of portraits of Bonaparte and Kleber; the Battle of the Pyramids, and other bad copies of the pictures at Versailles. The insufferably rude and insolent behaviour of some of our fellow countrymen, which here I witnessed for the first time, does, in my mind, go far to create dislike to us. We are the only Europeans these people see en masse. We are generally in an excited state crossing the desert, going to and fro, rushing hither and thither, to make the most of a few hours, full of practical jokes, and rejoicing in the high animal spirits, which seem to be quite crushed out of a French boy at school or the Lycée ! We ride at full gallop through the streets; laugh in the face of every long-bearded, odd-looking old Mussulman we see; despise all foreign dignity; scream with delight at the sight of an Egyptian officer, with spurs to his slippers and his pipe under his arm, and are the terror of quiet thoroughfares - that is, the lively young men are; and it was seriously propounded by one of my fellow-passengers, a man of great position and influence and intelligence in India, who shared my views as to our conduct, that whenever there is a

VOL. I.

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