We Made Up
A Party Of Some Half-Dozen From The Hotel, A Lady (The Kind Soda-
Water Provider, For Whose Hospitality The Most Grateful Compliments
Are Hereby Offered) Being Of The Company, Bent Like The Rest Upon
Going To The Summit Of Cheops.
Those who were cautious and wise,
took a brace of donkeys.
At least five times during the route did
my animals fall with me, causing me to repeat the desert experiment
over again, but with more success. The space between a moderate
pair of legs and the ground, is not many inches. By eschewing
stirrups, the donkey could fall, and the rider alight on the
ground, with the greatest ease and grace. Almost everybody was
down and up again in the course of the day.
We passed through the Ezbekieh and by the suburbs of the town,
where the garden-houses of the Egyptian noblesse are situated, to
Old Cairo, where a ferry-boat took the whole party across the Nile,
with that noise and bawling volubility in which the Arab people
seem to be so unlike the grave and silent Turks; and so took our
course for some eight or ten miles over the devious tract which the
still outlying waters obliged us to pursue. The Pyramids were in
sight the whole way. One or two thin silvery clouds were hovering
over them, and casting delicate rosy shadows upon the grand simple
old piles. Along the track we saw a score of pleasant pictures of
Eastern life:- The Pasha's horses and slaves stood caparisoned at
his door; at the gate of one country-house, I am sorry to say, the
Bey's GIG was in waiting, - a most unromantic chariot; the
husbandmen were coming into the city, with their strings of donkeys
and their loads; as they arrived, they stopped and sucked at the
fountain:
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