194 Eggs One Hundred for a Piastre [ x 895 



Said Pasha's time. ' Dans le temps de Said,' he answered, ' les ceufs 

 se vendaient cent pour une piastre. Voila ce que j'appelle la misere. 

 Pour le bien etre, oui. lis etaient a leur aise, et les impots etaient 

 moins eleves. Mais ils n'etaient pas au courant de la civilisation.' A 

 characteristic French answer. This is a good specimen of the ideas 

 even intelligent foreigners have, and he certainly spoke with sympathy 

 of the fellahin. Stopped for the night at Farshut, where they are 

 making the new railway bridge. It has been sweltering hot all the 

 afternoon, thermometer 85, but cool after sunset. 



"31st Oct. — Travelling due east, a pleasant wind in our faces — 

 multitudes of birds, not yet scared away by the tourists' guns, herons, 

 pelicans, little white herons, cormorants, pied kingfishers, hoopoes — 

 few signs of European life — immense crops of millet, taller than a 

 camel and rider, this makes the banks green. The Nile has fallen three 

 metres, and the shadoufs are at work. This is the season to see the 

 Upper Nile, or any part of it for that matter. I never had a pleasanter 

 fortnight at Sheykh Obeyd than since the 12th, when I returned there 

 — the garden a paradise of birds and beasts, two wolves every evening 

 in the palms at El Kheysheh, and numberless foxes — millions of spar- 

 rows roosting nightly in the orange trees (so that the whole garden 

 smelt in the morning like a bird-cage), everything perfection. 



" Past Keneh there are splendid reaches of the river, with banks beau- 

 tifully wooded with sont trees in full flower besides abels, nebuks, and 

 palms of both sorts — no lebbeks nor gemeyschs, though I saw a huge 

 dead trunk of a gemeyseh by the water side. The lebbek, though an 

 old Egyptian tree, seems to have become almost extinct till the present 

 century, when it was reintroduced with the other modern improve- 

 ments. There can be none in the country older than seventy or eightv 

 years, big trees as they are. 



" 1st Nov. — Luxor. The Luxor Hotel is open, but empty with the 

 exception of an invalid doctor (Dr. Ruffer) and his wife, and New- 

 bury, an archaeologist, who comes in for meals, having been here 

 through the summer. Tourists there are none. I went out before sun- 

 rise and looked at the temple, and later to Karnak. The ancient 

 Egyptians seem always to have built on the Nile mud, a mean founda- 

 tion. 



" The Consul, Ahmed Eff. Mustafa, called on me and invited me to 

 luncheon, an Egyptian meal served with much hospitality. He is an 

 honest, good man, of the fellah type, very proud of his visitors' book, 

 which dates from 1855, and is a pretty complete history of modern 

 Egypt. I found my brother Francis' name and Alice's, and Lady 

 Herbert's party, and the Mures and Spencers, who were here in daha- 

 biyahs in (the autumn of) 1863, and Lady Dufferin's in 1858, with a 

 vast number of others recalling old memories, Strangford's, Beaufort's, 



