252 By Stream and Sea. 



By the aid of a powerful glass I could make out a half- 

 withered shrub to the east of the Custom-house, otherwise 

 there was nothing growing to be seen. Round about the 

 harbour the red-tiled and white-walled houses are of fairly- 

 respectable structure ; elsewhere Port Said has a decidedly 

 tumble-down appearance. The long breakwaters by which 

 the port is made approachable no doubt answer their design, 

 and could only have been laid down with much cost and 

 patient labour ; but rougher sea-walls were surely never seen. 

 These are typical of the town. It is a motley collection of 

 hastily put together shops and stores ; a place of temporary 

 sojourn for the odds and ends of all nations, and a per- 

 manent home for none. Surrounded by the desert primeval, 

 and glared upon by a pitiless sun, Port Said is fearfully 

 hot as a residence ; no amount of jalousies and verandahs 

 can alter that fact. The trade is precarious, because the 

 customers are here to-day and gone to-morrow. The entire 

 aspect of the place is consequently unsettled. There are 

 some barracks, truly, and soldiers, the former wretched 

 hovels, the latter terrible rapscallions in appearance. I saw 

 a sentry on duty in absolute tatters, and foul swine were 

 tearing at a sewer that ran at his naked feet. The tiles 

 were tumbling off the house of the chief Egyptian official ; 

 the civil servants of the Crown in the everlasting fez were 

 writing despatches and documents in a tenement to which a 

 village barn in England would be palatial. 



In the Arab village, as they grandiloquently dub it, things 

 were more interesting, because there was no pretence at 

 civilization, and the native Egyptian-Arabs and negroes of 

 every description appeared in the scorching streets in all the 

 unconscious simplicity of their race, and in all the really 

 picturesque variety of costume peculiar to their tribalities. 

 Women covered from head to foot, save the two black 



