ll of that European
continent. You may talk about your temples and your ruins and your old
masters! Have _you_ ever seen "Old Glory" flying straight out from a
flagstaff in a foreign country seven thousand miles away from home?

The Nile is much broader than I expected to find it, and, like the
Missouri and the Golden Horn, it is always muddy. The _Mayflower_
carries only fifty passengers, which is of the greatest advantage for
donkey-rides and for seeing the ruins, a larger party being unwieldy.
She draws but two feet of water, having been built expressly for Nile
service, so we had the proud satisfaction of seeing one of the big
Rameses boats stuck on a sand-bank for eighteen hours, while we tooted
past her blowing whistles of defiance and derision. Whenever we felt
ourselves going aground on a sand-bank we just reversed the engines
and backed off again, or else put on extra steam and ground our way
through it. In the whole three weeks we were not aground five minutes,
although we passed one wreck settling in the water, with the bedding
and stores piled up on the bank, and the passengers sailing away in
the swallow-winged feluccas, which had swooped down to their rescue
like so many compassionate birds.

Afternoon tea on the Nile is an unforgetable function. Everybody comes
on deck and sits under the awning and watches the sun go down. Each
day the sunsets grow more beautiful. Each day they differ from all the
rest. Such yellows and purples! Such violet shadows on the golden
water! Such a marvellously sudden sinking of the sun in a crimson
flame behind the flat brown hills! And then the stillness of the Nile
in the opal aftermath! Those sunsets are something to carry in the
memory forever and a day.

At night the sailors lower the side awnings, crawling along the
railings with their naked prehensile feet. The captain, a Nubian, on a
salary of eighty-five cents a day, selects a suitable spot on the bank
where the boat may remain all night. Then the bow of the boat heads
for the shore and digs her nose in the soft mud. The sailors pitch the
stakes and mallets out on to the bank and spring ashore. Then with
Arab songs which they always sing when rowing, hauling ropes,
scrubbing the decks, or doing any sort of work, the stern is gradually
hauled alongside the bank, and there we stay until morning in a
stillness so absolute that even the cry of the jackals seems in
harmony with the loneliness of it.

I dreaded the fir