Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/117

Rh to the outlying strip of grassland which serves the town for a racecourse.

The dwellers in this corner of the ruins of ancient Thebes—insignificant fraction as they are of its once vast population—have done their best, it must be owned, to make a good show. There are, perhaps, 4000 or so of native Egyptians, collected together from Luxor and its vicinity, traders of the town, local donkey-boys with their "allied industries," loafers from the neighbouring villages, and so forth; and, packed three or four deep along the rope that lines the half-mile of "straight" which constitutes the entire course, they present a curiously picturesque contrast to the race-going crowd that assembles on Epsom Downs or Ascot Heath. Blue and white, with an occasional splash of red from a fez, form a prettier arrangement of colour than those rows of black and grey wideawakes, surmounting grey and black masses of clothing, which together make up the general effect produced by an assembly