250 EXTRACTS FROM 
Soon after this short interlude we arrived at a wretched 
miserable-looking village, the low ruinous mud hovels of 
which were not worthy of its splendid surroundings of lofty 
palms and wide-spreading sycamores. The inhabitants 
came running out to look at us, the older ones in airy 
costumes, the children in none at all. Near this village 
the road took a turn and soon brought us to the margin of 
the lake. 
When everything had been unloaded from the horses and 
the pack animals we got into the boats. These were truly 
wretched crafts, nor could our lake-dwelling ancestors have 
used anything worse than these flat four-cornered boxes, 
which were slowly propelled with the most primitive oars by 
five or six sturdy fellows. Inside them everything was full 
of old fish-bones, and there was such a stench of dirt of all 
sorts, and particularly of stinking fish, that we could only 
partially protect ourselves from it by the perpetual smoking 
of cigarettes. The fishermen of the earliest Hgyptian eras 
probably used the same sort of boats as their descendants of 
to-day at Birket-el-Karun. 
With melancholy songs and splashing oars we glided over 
the blue surface of this large interesting lake, which is bordered 
on one side by the cultivated ground and on the others by 
the true desert. All along its shores runs a belt of dense 
luxuriant bushes, sometimes narrow, sometimes broad, and 
this gives it a distinctive character. Nowhere does one see 
human habitations, and the grand but undeniably depressing 
effect of the scene is heightened by the deep leaden blue of 
the salt water. It seems strange to the traveller to finda 
lake so far from the sea (the reader will kindly look at a 
map) in whose depths live true marine fish and other sorts of 
creatures ; but as the entire desert is salt, the lakes on its 
borders are naturally the same. 
When we had been half an hour on the way we perceived 
