CHAPTER VI 



EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN 



Family matters Malta and Alexandria Nile Korosko Berber by 

 desert Boat to Khartum and White Nile Bayouda Desert to 

 Dongola Wady Haifa and Cairo Recent visit to Professor Petrie's 

 camp at Abydos 



THE home side of my surroundings has been 

 only slightly alluded to, not that it was of 

 small importance to myself, but because it belonged 

 to a different phase of my life from that with which 

 I am here chiefly concerned. When I had outgrown 

 the tuition of my sister Adele, I led in one sense 

 a solitary life. For though I joined my other two 

 unmarried sisters in their social amusements, I was 

 always treated by them and their companions as a 

 boy, and I felt during this time like an only child 

 with aunts. Their affection to me was deep, so was 

 mine to them, but it was not and could not be 

 reciprocated on equal terms. But I received in full 

 measure the priceless treasure of a home, in which 

 each member knew the essential characteristics, good 

 and bad, of all the others, and who loved each other 

 all the same, and would support him or her through 

 thick and thin. The younger of my brothers, Erasmus, 

 was mostly away ; in the first instance in the navy, 



afterwards in fanning his property in Somersetshire, 



83 



