GRAND CAIRO. 85 
enjoined that none of the cooking vessels should chap. 
be touched, except by their own hands. After ' 
dinner, the officers smoked the hooka: every 
pipe had its peculiar attendant upon the outside 
of the tent ; the long flexible tubes alone being 
brought under the sides of the pavihon to those 
seated at table. The servants in waiting were 
principally negroes, dressed in white turbans 
with muslin jackets, but without stockings or 
shoes. The upper part of the pavilion was 
adorned with beautiful net-work ; the hangings 
were of green silk, and the floor covered with 
Indian mats. The tables were of polished ma- 
hogany ; and the company present in full uni- 
form; — an association of things so incongruous 
with the natural horrors and barbarism of the 
country, upon the border of an interminable 
desert, and in the midst of such a river as the 
Nile, where persons from India and from England 
were met to banquet together, that perhaps no 
similar result of commerce and of conquest is 
ever likely to occur again, in any part of the 
habitable globe. Upon this occasion, we heard Discovery 
the extraordinary fact, maintained and confirmed ^lalmLs 
by indisputable testimony, that cexidiixi Brahmins ^^g^pff 
who had accompanied the Indian army in its 
march from the Red Sea to the Nile, from Cosseir 
to Kene, saw at Dendera the representation of 
