Parting from this warlike band with mutual compliments and good wishes,
and our guides each seizing the tail of one of our donkeys to increase
his onward speed, we trotted away back to the boat, which was waiting
for us at Souhag. There we found our boatmen and a crowd of villagers,
listening to one of those long stories with which the inhabitants of
Egypt are wont to enliven their hours of inactivity. This is an
amusement peculiar to the East, and it is one in which I took great
delight during many a long journey through the deserts on the way
to Mount Sinai, Syria, and other places. The Arabs are great tellers of
stories; and some of them have a peculiar knack in rendering them
interesting and exciting the curiosity of their audience. Many of these
stories were interesting from their reference to persons and occurrences
of Holy Writ, particularly of the Old Testament. There are many legends
of the patriarch Abraham and his beautiful wife Sarah, who, excepting
Eve, is said to have been the fairest of all the daughters of the earth.
King Solomon is the hero of numerous strange legends; and his adventures
with the gnomes and genii who were subjected to his sway are endless.
The poem of Yousef and Zuleica is well known in Europe. And the
traditions relating to the prophet Moses are so numerous, that, with the
help of a very curious manuscript of an apocryphal book ascribed to the
great leader of the Jews, I have been enabled to compile a connected
biography, in which many curious circumstances are detailed that are
said to have taken place during his eventful life, and which concludes
with a highly poetical legend of his death. Many of the stories told by
the Arabs resemble those of the _Arabian Nights_; and a large proportion
of these are not very refined.

I have often been greatly amused with watching the faces of an audience
who were listening to a well-told story, some eagerly leaning forward,
others smoking their pipes with quicker puffs, when something
extraordinary was related, or when the hero of the story had got into
some apparently inextricable dilemma. These story-telling parties are
usually to be seen seated in a circle on the ground in a shady place.
The donkey-boy will stop and gape open-mouthed on overhearing a few
words of the marvellous adventures of some enchanted prince, and will
look back at his four-footed companion, fearing lest he should resume
his original form of a merchant from the island of