barge
in which we were to be conveyed both very confined and dirty. But it
proceeded at tolerable speed, drawn by horses which were pursued by
well-mounted Arabs yelling, lashing, and cracking with their whips. We
all passed a fearful night of suffocation and jambing, fasting and
feasted on by millions. Some red-coated bedlamites, unfortunately
infatuated with wine, had to be held from jumping overboard. The
ramping and stamping, and roaring and scrambling for room to sit or
lie, was horrific. At last the day dawned, when matters were not quite
so bad; but we moved over our fifty miles of ditch-water to Atfeh in a
manner the most uncomfortable any poor sinners ever suffered.'

The account given of his entry to Cairo is also strikingly faithful.
'When I landed at Boulac, another Oriental scene of novelty was
presented. Crowds of men and women, all in their shirts only--lazy
looking-on watermen calling for employment, porters packing luggage on
the camels, donkey-boys, little active urchins, offering their asses,
crying: "Here him best donkey"--"you Englese no walk"--"him kick
highest"--"him fine jackass"--"me take you to Cairo." There were also
plenty of custom-house folks demanding fees to which they had no
right, and sturdy rascals seeking buckshish, and miserable beggars
imploring alms. Walking through this promiscuous crowd, with all the
dignity they could muster, there were venerable sheiks, or Egyptian
oolema, with white turbans, and long silvery beards, and tawny
sinister faces. And there were passengers not a few, with a carpet-bag
in the one hand and a lady hanging on the other arm, crowding from the
deck to the shore.

'The moment I mounted the stair at the pier of Boulac, I found myself
in the red dusky haze of an Egyptian atmosphere. It was near noon, and
the rays of the hot sun trembled over the boundless Valley of the Nile
on to the minarets of Cairo, and further still to the sombre Pyramids.
Now, indeed, the scene before me presented a superb illusion of
beauty. The bold range of the Mockattam Mountains, its craggy summits
cut clearly out in the sky, seemed to run like a promontory into a sea
of the richest verdure; here, wavy with breezy plantations of olives;
there, darkened with acacia groves. Just where the mountain sinks upon
the plain, the citadel stands on its last eminence, and widely spread
beneath lies the city--a forest of minarets, with palm-trees
intermingled, and the domes of innumerable m