226 THE VOYAGE TO INDIA 



our arrival,' writes the latter, ' he took me on one side and 

 invited me to belong to his suite for the future, in the most 

 kind and handsome manner.' Hooker accordingly travelled 

 freely in the Governor- General's launch to Cairo, accompanied 

 him to Mehemet Ali's reception, and from Suez sailed not on 

 the ordinary packet-boat but on the East India Company's 

 frigate sent to convey the Governor. This smoothed away 

 many of the minor difficulties of travel, especially the refusal 

 of the India Board in London to give him a passage, because 

 the Company's naval officers disliked the ships being employed 

 as passage-boats. 



The journey to Cairo was effected by water. A * pretty 

 little steamer of the size and shape of a Woolwich boat,' be- 

 longing to the transit company, took the party eighty miles 

 to the Nile,* along the Mamudieh Canal, Mehemet Ali's vast 

 work carried out by the forced labour of the corvee, which 

 drew all the unhappy fellahin from the fields unpaid and 

 unfed, and was followed by a disastrous famine. * It reminded 

 me * — ^he draws a homely comparison for his father — ' of the 

 canal through the Bog of Allan, if you can suppose that wholly 

 bare of any vegetation except around the very scattered 

 Egyptian or Turks' houses.' From this point Mehemet's own 

 steamer, the size of a Greenwich boat, took them another 

 twenty hours' journey to Cairo. 



Cairo he found * a most interesting place for everything but 

 its botany,' standing as it did * half in the desert and half 

 on the alluvial deposit, so that you enter it amongst gardens, 

 avenues, and richly cultivated fields, and step from the gates 

 on the other side into utter steriHty.' 



As for the Ehoda Gardens, originally laid out by Ali Pasha 

 with the oriental desire of getting shade and refreshing masses 

 of green, he frankly confesses to disappointment in them, 



from not previously appreciating the many obstacles Egypt 

 presents to the formation of a real garden of Exotics. It 

 must be near the Nile for water ; and then it must be flooded 

 at one season, and burnt up the next ; a state of things to 

 which few plants will subject themselves, and whence it is 

 that on the fertile banks of the Nile there is little or no native 



