the N. Y. Herald, Paris edition, and send back the
names of those who are staying at the hotels. That is really all you
can speak with authority about. When you have Gordon and Stanley
dishes on the bill-of-fare, you feel ashamed to say you've been in
Egypt. Anyway, I am a faker and I don't care, and I proved it today by
being photographed on a camel in front of the Pyramids, and if that
wasn't impertinence I do not know its name. I accordingly went and
bought a lot of gold dresses for Nora as a penance.

As a matter of fact, unless I get into the interior for a month and see
something new, I shall consider the trip a failure, except as a most
amusing holiday for one, and that was not exactly what I wanted or all
I wanted. After this I shall go to big cities only and stay there.
Everybody travels and everybody sees as much as you do and says nothing
of it, certainly does not presume to write a book about it. Anyway, it
has been great fun, so I shall put it down to that and do some serious
work to make up for it. I'd rather have written a good story about the
Inauguration than about Cairo.

I am well, as usual, and having a fine loaf, only I don't think much of
what I have written--that's all.

DICK.

CAIRO, March 19th, 1893.

DEAR MOTHER:

I went up the Pyramids yesterday and I am very sore today. It sounds
easy because so many people do it, but they do it because they don't
know. I have been putting it off, and putting it off, until I felt
ashamed to such a degree that I had to go. Little had never been
either, so we went out together and met Stanford White and the Emmetts
there, and we all went up. I would rather go into Central Africa than
do it again. I am getting fat and that's about it--and I had to half
pull a much fatter man than myself who pretended to help me. I finally
told them I'd go alone unless the fat man went away, so the other two
drove him off. Going down is worse. It's like looking over a
precipice all the time. I was so glad when I got down that I sang with
glee. I hate work like that, and to make it worse I took everybody's
picture on top of the Pyramid, and forgot to have one of them take me,
so there is no way to prove I ever went up. Little and I hired two
donkeys and called them "Gallegher" and "Van Bibber" and raced them.
My donkey was so little that they couldn't see him--only his ears.
Gallegher won. The donkey-boys called it Von Bebey, so I don't think
it will h