here it stands, the
upper portion forming the head and bust of a human being, to which is
added the body with the paws of an animal. The great size of the figure
will be realized when we mention the fact that the face alone is thirty
feet long and half as wide. The body is in a sitting posture, with the
paws extended forward some fifty feet or more. This strange figure is
believed to be of much greater antiquity than the Pyramids, but no one
can say how old it really is. Notwithstanding its mutilated condition,
showing the furrows of time, the features have still a sad, tranquil
expression, telling of the original dignity of the design.

From Cairo we take the railway to Ismailia, the little town situated
midway on the Suez Canal, between the two seas, at the Bitter Lakes,
through which the course of the canal runs. It is a pretty and
attractive place, containing four or five thousand inhabitants, and is a
creation of the last few years. Here we observe gardens filled with
choice flowers and fruit-trees, vegetation being in its most verdant
dress, promoted by irrigation from the neighboring fresh-water canal.
The place has broad, neat streets, and a capacious central square,
ornamented with large and thrifty trees. It was here that the
representatives of all nations met on the occasion of the inaugurating
ceremony on the completion of De Lesseps's canal. We take a small mail
steamer at Ismailia, through the western half of the canal to Port Said,
the Mediterranean terminus of the great artificial river. It is a fact
worthy of remembrance that, with all our modern improvements and
progressive ideas, the Egyptians were centuries before us in this plan
of shortening the path of commerce between the East and the West; or,
in other words, of connecting the Red Sea with that of the Mediterranean
across the Isthmus and through the Gulf of Suez. The purpose was
probably never thoroughly carried out until De Lesseps's consummation of
it as it now exists.

Port Said, like Suez, derives its only interest and importance from the
canal. It contains some seven thousand inhabitants, with a floating
population of two thousand. The region round about it is perfectly
barren, like Egypt nearly everywhere away from the valley of the Nile.
Through that part of the desert which we pass in coming from Suez, one
looks in vain for any continuous sign of vegetation. The entire absence
of trees and forests accounts for the lack also of wild beas