THE JOURNEY TO INDIA. 13 



ful minarets and mosque-domes shining brightly in the morning 

 sun. Above the city, where there were no hills to hide it from our 

 view, we could see the sluggish Nile, and trace its winding course 

 through the narrow, level valley of fertile fields that stretched 

 like a ribbon of green velvet between the two great deserts. 

 Beyond Cairo, at the edge of the green valley, the Pyramids loomed 

 up far above the horizon, mysterious and majestic mountains of 

 stone, while far beyond them stretched a vast but lifeless ocean — 

 a sea of desolate sand, reaching from the Nile to the far-off shore of 

 the Atlantic. 



On our way home from the Petrified Forest with a camel-load 

 of specimens, we stopped at the limestone quarry a mile fi-om the 

 city, to look for fossils in the piles of rock that had recently been 

 quarried from the clifF. In a couple of hours' vigorous scrambling 

 and hammering, we secured a fine assortment of fossils, including 

 about thirty good specimens of a pretty little fossd crab, bearing, 

 as none but a stone crab could, the appalling name of Lobocarciniis 

 Paulo-Wurlemhiirgensh, a number of large Nautili, and several 

 species of Voluta, Turritella and Cerithium. The most interesting 

 find was a rib of a Sirenian. 



Egypt is one of the grandest countries in the world for an anti- 

 quarian, but one of the poorest for a naturalist. The Polypterus 

 (a ganoid fish valuable to science because of its close resemblance 

 to Osteolepis, a fossil fish of the Devonian) is found in the Nile, 

 but it is exceedingly rare. Crocodiles (C. vulgaris) are also found 

 in the Nile, but so far above Cairo that we decided not to hunt 

 them. A trip up the Nile by rail, four hundred and fifty-seven 

 miles to the mummy pits at Manfalout, revealed the fact that the 

 pits had been fairly gleaned of the mummied crocodiles, ibises, 

 cats, and human beings they once contained. The result of this 

 tedious three days' trip was but two mummied crocodiles, a skull, 

 and an armful of mummied arms, legs, and heads of ancient Egj-p- 

 tiaus. 



An Arab brought us an earthen jar, said to contain a mummied 

 ibis, for which he asked the modest sum of £1. The mouth of the 

 jar was tightly closed with cement, and the Arab would not allow us 

 to open it, so Professor Ward, who had seen Arabs before, declined 

 it with thanks. We met an old Bedouin who had just come across 

 the desert from the peninsula of Sinai,- and had carried on one of 

 his camels, all that weary distance, seven heads of Egyptian ibex 

 {Capra Nubiana), all of which were qmckly added to our collection 



