on the other hand the ignoble squalor of the Frank settlers, with their wineshops and their swine, was one which could not escape us, or fail to rouse in us an angry sense of the incongruity which has made of these last the lords of the land and of those their servants. It was a new political lesson which I took to heart, though still regarding it as in no sense my personal affair.

Such had been the preliminary training of my life, and such its main circumstances when, as I have said, in the winter of 1875-6 I first visited Egypt. The only other matter which, perhaps, deserves here a word of explanation to non-English readers, and it is one that in Europe will receive its full appreciation, is the fact that my wife, Lady Anne Blunt, who accompanied me on all these travels, was the grandaughter of our great national poet, Lord Byron, and so was the inheritor, in some sort, of sympathies in the cause of freedom in the East, which were not without their effect upon our subsequent action. It seemed to us, in presence of the events of 1881-2, that to champion the cause of Arabian liberty would be as worthy an endeavour as had been that for which Byron had died in 1827. As yet, however, in 1875, neither of us had any thought in visiting Egypt more serious than that of another pleasant travelling adventure in Eastern lands. We had on leaving England the plan of entering Egypt from the south, by way of Suakim, Kassala, and the Blue Nile, and so of working our way northwards to Cairo in the spring, but this, owing to the issue, just then so unfortunate to Egypt, of the Abyssinian campaign, was never realized, and the only part of our program which we carried out was that instead of landing at Alexandria, as was then the universal custom, we went on by the Canal to Suez and there first set foot upon Egyptian soil.

My first impression of all of Egypt is of our passage on the last day of the year 1875 through Lake Menzaleh, at that time the unpersecuted home of innumerable birds—a truly wonderful spectacle of prodigal natural life—to a point on the Canal north of Ismaïlia. What a sight it was! Lake Menzaleh was still an almost virgin region, and the flocks of flamingos, ducks, pelicans, and ibises which covered it, passed all belief in their prodigious magnitude. The waters, too, of the lakes and of the Canal itself were alive with fish so large and in such great quantities that not a few were run down by our ship's bows in passing, while everywhere they were being preyed on by fish hawks and cormorants, which sat watching on the posts and buoys. I imagine that the letting in of the sea for the first time on land never before covered with water provided the fish with feeding ground of exceptional richness, an advantage which has since been lost. But certain it is that both fish and birds have dwindled sadly since, and it seems unlikely that the splendid spectacle we saw that winter will be again enjoyed there by any traveller's eyes.

We landed at Suez in the first days of the year 1876, and the news of the great disaster which had overtaken the Egyptian army in Abyssinia was the first that greeted us. The details of it were not generally known, but it appeared that seven ortas, or divisions, of the Khedivial troops had perished, while a tale was in circulation of the Khedive's son, Prince Hassan, having been captured and mutilated by the enemy, an exaggeration which was afterwards disproved, for the prince, a mere boy at the time, had been carried away from the battlefield of Kora early in the day, at the very beginning of the rout, as had Ratib Pasha himself, the Egyptian general in command, who was in charge of him. Loringe Pasha, however, the American, had really lost his life with many thousands of the rank and file, and the misfortune put a final limit to the Khedive Ismaïl's ambition of universal empire on the Nile. In our small way it affected us, as making our thought of a journey to Kassala impossible, and deciding us on a less adventurous one immediately in Lower Egypt.

We were anxious, nevertheless, to see Egypt in a less conventional way than that of ordinary tourists, and, having our camping equipment with us for the longer journey, we hired camels at Suez and went by the old caravan route to Cairo. It is not necessary that I should say much of our journey across the desert. The four days spent in it alone with our Bedouin camel-men gave us our first practical lessons in Arabic—in Algeria we had been dependent wholly on a dragoman—and they laid the basis, too, of those relations with the desert tribes of Arabia which were afterwards to become so pleasant to us and so intimate. On the fifth morning we entered Cairo, greeted on our arrival at Abbassiyeh by the whistling of bullets fired by the Khedivial troops at practice, for we had unwittingly encamped overnight just behind their targets and the aim of the recruits was very uncertain, but no harm was suffered. We little thought at the time that we should ever be interested in the doings of these soldiers as a fighting army, and still less that our sympathies would one day be with them in a war against our own countrymen. I was as yet, though not perhaps even then enthusiastically so, a believer in the common English creed that England had a providential mission in the East, and that our wars were only waged there for honest and beneficent reasons. Nothing was further from my mind than that we English ever could be guilty, as a nation, of a great betrayal of justice in arms for our mere selfish interests.

Neither need I say anything in detail about Cairo, through which we passed that day without stopping longer than to ask for our letters at the Consulate. Our object was to see the country districts and not to waste time on a city already in part European, and we thought to find camping ground immediately beyond the Nile. So we rode on. We did not understand the entreaties of our camel-men that we should alight and let them and their camels go back, or realize that we were doing them an injustice by forcing them to break the tribal rule which forbade them as Bedouins of the eastern desert to cross over to the west. In spite of their expostulations we held on our way by the Kasr-el-Nil bridge and the road to Ghizeh. We had caught sight of the Pyramids and pushed on eagerly in their direction, and were only stopped by the failing light which overtook us at sunset close to the little fellah village of Tolbiya, the last but one before the Pyramids are reached. It was there that we made our halt and alighted for the first time on the black soil of the Nile, as yet hardly dry from the autumn inundation.

The good people of Tolbiya, in their hearty fellah fashion, received us with all possible hospitality. Though living on the tourist road to the Pyramids and accustomed to treat Frank travellers in some sort as their prey, the fact of our alighting at their village for a night's lodging gave us a character of guests they at once recognized. Of all the Europeans who for many years had passed their way, not one had made a pause at their doors. Thus our relations with them were from the outset friendly, and the accident served us as an introduction in the sequel to other villagers when, after a few days spent among these, we went once more on our way. We had no choice at the time but to stay where we were, for in the morning our Bedouins refused to go a mile farther with us, and, having received their hire, departed with their camels. Other camels then had to be found. So it happened that my first week in Egypt was occupied in going a round of the neighbouring village markets in search of the needed beasts, and making purchases of pack saddles and water, skins and all kinds of travelling gear for our further journey.

The fellahin at that time were in terrible straits of poverty. It was the first of the three last terrible years of the Khedive