serenity of Normandy cows, not to be disturbed by steam, whistles, or engines. We had wisely mistrusted the commissariat department, and were devouring some slices of cold veal which we had brought from the hotel Abat, when a cry of admiration escaped simultaneously from our mouths. They were full, but the exclamation was none the less sincere. There they are! There they are!' 'Who? What?' eagerly asked our famished fellow-travellers, who were looking at the cold veal-as though they expected to see it smoke under the burning sunso stedfastly that they had perceived nothing. The Pyramids, of course!' replied our dear master, in the tone of a man to whom they were very old acquaintances, and who was about to please them very much by a visit. Sure enough, there were the Pyramids, standing out from the horizon, against a background of flecked sky, for the day was beginning to decline. Such was our first sight of those three stone giants, which seemed to make us doubt the possibility of the world ever coming to an end. an end. Seen from the railroad, Cairo resembles a forest of minarets and cupolas, and any description of it must necessarily be incomplete. But we were going thither! We were there! We are there!

A TRANCE IN ACTION.

15

SKETCH IV.

CAIRO.

A Week at Cairo-Bewilderment-The Streets-The Bazaars-The Mouski-Old Cairo-The Valley of Tombs-The Mosques.

'ON ass-back, gentlemen, on ass-back!'

And, just as in a Japanese dream, we were all on ass-back before we had time to know why; and then, still in the opium trance, without either the power or the will to offer any resistance, we were carried away at full speed, whither, only Adha Anna, our temporary dragoman, knew! Flung, as it were, into a human whirlpool, we had hardly any consciousness of our fantastic situation. A truly infernal uproar made it utterly impossible for us to call, or to hear each other, as our little party rushed onward in a kind of frantic race, in which a laggard was in the plight of a man overboard.

Chmålak! Yeminak! Reglak! shouted our donkey-boys, delighted with our amazement and our fears, and anxious to secure our custom by accelera

ting the speed of the less spirited asses by repeated blows. At length, after we had swallowed enough dust in one hour to suffice for a lifetime, we began to recognize each other here and there in the crowd, and to be satisfied that, as yet, we had lost no victims by the way. We had left the Choubra route, and the tumult of horsemen, dromedaries, vehicles, and footpassengers, was beginning to subside a little. Heavy huge calèches, preceded by runners in rich costumes, passed us at full speed; in this more aristocratic quarter the authorities have prudently prohibited camel traffic, which is a terrible complication of a crowded eastern thoroughfare. At least twenty times, in our headlong progress, I was on the point of being caught by one of these enormous calèches, and saved by the dexterity of my ass, to whom the shock would have been as terrible as to me, and who was an animal of genius. At length we were permitted to moderate our pace at Ezbekyèh, an enchanting place.

were on the Boulevard des Italiens of the district, and we owed it to ourselves to travel in a less Apocalyptic fashion.

The ass plays too important a part in the life of Cairo, and indeed the whole East, to be refused the honour of a zoological digression.

THE CAIRENE ASS.

17

In the first place, my ass was not an ass; it was, properly speaking, an ass of Cairo, a quadruped of a special nature, not to be confounded with that mere beast of burden, the vulgar ass. The Cairene ass is as lively, adroit, intelligent, and indefatigable, as his brethren of Montmorency are vicious, idle, and stubborn. The ass is the first, best, and most constant friend one makes in the East, where one never wears out a pair of boots; and the clients of St. Crispin have a bad time of it, for everybody is always on horse or dromedary-back.

We lived on ass-back during the whole of our expedition in the province of Fayoum, as we lived on dromedary-back during our two months in the desert of Sinai and in Petra. We installed ourselves at Cairo in the house of a, Frenchman who had formerly been a cook, and we had nothing to complain of except the prodigality of our daily bill of fare, to which we were obliged to oppose a system of rigorous temperance. On our arrival we were worn out by the railway journey, and went to our beds at once.

'I know what I shall do,' said each of our party separately to himself, as he tucked himself in, under his mosquito net. 'I shall get up to-morrow, at four o'clock in the morning, take an ass, and start off by

C

myself, until breakfast time.' The result of this general, though unimparted resolution, was that we all found ourselves, to the common satisfaction, starting off at the same hour, on ass-back, with the same intentions. Our programme had always included. entire individual liberty, and we accepted it as a good omen that on this first occasion we had all been actuated by a similar impulse. In fact, we each and all understood, from what we had already observed, · that true happiness consists, in the Egyptian world, of riding on ass-back about the streets, because in the streets everything which is curious and beautiful is to be found. So we set off. Mouski, of which our house forms the corner, was the first picture in that endless series of enchanting surprises which was prepared for us.

Before I throw the rein loose upon the neck of my swift courser, let me remind you that Cairo is the capital of Egypt even more emphatically than Paris is the capital of France, for this good reason, that Paris is only a city, and that Cairo alone is an entire province. It is more than a province; it is a world; it is all the East, past, present, and to come, as complete as in the time of the Mamelouks, as brilliant as at its apogee, as picturesque as under the Caliphs. After a three years' residence, it would be a great