is bound to extend protection to strangers who, by pitching their tents upon its territory, honour it with their confidence and esteem. We were given a certain small official character in the eyes of the population, who collected around our camp and gazed at us as if they took us for curious animals, calmly watching all the domestic operations of our open-air household.

Our kitchen, our saucepans, and the method by which we prepared our food, amused them immensely. We certainly appeared to them to be savages from the West, who fed on unknown materials, and shamelessly drank wine before the face of the Prophet himself.

The entrance to this little acropolis was specially. remarkable; in this place, the walls which surround the village are higher, leaving a passage which must be filled up at the time of the rising of the Nile. Two white cupolas, flanked by two elegant minarets, are like the scenes in a comic opera for grace of form and the premeditated, placed-there-on-purpose look they have. These mosques, which are built of rude. materials, are of the purest Arab style in their outlines, and also in their ornamentation.

The children and women took a great interest in

I FRIGHTEN THE NATIVES.

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us, and I particularly remember the number of spectators who witnessed my arrangements for taking the portrait of the village. They remained, generally in silence, watching my least movement, for hours together, their curiosity being specially excited by my colour-box. I amused myself by putting a little colour on their fingers. Several were delighted; but others were so frightened that they ran away screaming, as if I had thrown an evil eye upon them. I sketched some European hieroglyphics upon the earthen jars of some of the women there, which made them laugh merrily, and I was soon besieged with commissions, most eager and flattering, quite beyond my power to execute, notwithstanding all my good will. After a farewell visit to the sheik, who had come on the previous evening to our encampment, we set out at six o'clock in the morning, escorted by the population.

Two very ill-equipped horsemen had been given us as guides, for we were now about to enter in earnest upon the desert route to the centre of Middle Egypt.

SKETCH VI.

THE DESERT.

A Sand-strewn Breakfast-Tamyèh-- The Conservatoire of Dogs-A
Wild Boar Hunt with a Knife.

AFTER having successively followed and crossed a long series of canals and ponds, we reached the confines of the cultivated land, and began to tread the sands of the Desert. This was to be a hard day's work, for we were to make only one stage of it to the village of Tamyèh, which is in the centre of the province of Fayoum. The day was, in fact, a hard one, notwithstanding the precautions we had taken, because we had not counted upon a hurricane of sand which surprised us in the midst of the Desert, just at the always interesting moment of dinner.

It must have been mid-day at the Bourse, but it was at least four o'clock by our stomachs. We had unpacked our ordinary flat dishes and plates, with all the eatables which were to figure upon them, and our eyes were already devouring the papers in which all these cold viands were wrapped up. We were just

taking hold of our forks, when, quicker than lightning, an immense sheet of sand fell upon us, the sand-hill against which we were seated was dispersed by the tempest, and rushed like a cascade over everything, ourselves and our breakfast included. Waves of sand, lifted from the earth, struck us in the face, and blinded us. The bottles, the plates and dishes, the eatables, were all buried in sand, and we had to dig vigorously to prevent our furniture and ourselves from disappearing in the cataclysm. The Arabs, after giving us a little help in our distress, lay down in the sand, thus avoiding the painful contact of the wind, which struck us in the face, like blows from a whip. The temperature had suddenly changed: icy cold had replaced the heat which we had been feeling since the morning; and, like the currents of hot and cold water in the sea or in rivers, this layer of cold air seemed to fall from some celestial glacier. Our wretched asses suffered horribly; notwithstanding their strong instinct of self-preservation, and the devoted exertions of the Arabs, the unfortunate animals were seized with actual convulsions, and they struggled and rolled about in frantic efforts to escape from the invading sand. The blood streamed from their eyes and nostrils, and in the midst of the

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uproar, we thought of the army of King Cambyses, which, surprised, like us, in the desert, did not bring back so much as a single chassepot.

Even our dragoman acknowledged that this was a terrible day, and one of the hardest of our expedition. The matter in hand was to get away. This was laborious enough, for, after we had found the greater part of our accessories, we had to set to work to extract our asses from the sand, and to bring them on. We muffled our faces in veils and kouffies, but the sand got through everything; our eyes were full of it, and the violence with which it came against our skin almost flayed us alive. At the expiration of two hours the storm abated, happily for the success of our journey, and we passed on to another experience.

In an opposite direction to that in which we were journeying, the mirage showed us endless rows of palm-trees; our critical situation, this treacherous apparition, and the inverse route which we were pursuing, contributed to render us apprehensive about what the result of our day might be. At length, the Arabs, whose eyes are accustomed to the desert and its snares, pointed out some real palm-trees. But I could not see them until we had advanced nearer to them