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 w^ater. 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 sterility.' 
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 
