Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/18

4. I listened with amazement at the simple story. For thousands and thousands of miles, he made his way through swamp and jungle and forest, across deserts and over mountains. "And how did you travel?" I asked. "On foot." "With whom?" "Alone!" There is nothing in all the history of exploration more touching than the story of the loss of his treasures. When he had travelled more than two years, and amassed a collection of priceless value, it was destroyed in an hour by the burning of an African village. Then indeed he feared that his reason might give way. To keep his mind in action, he began keeping a record of his own footsteps along his lonely and dreary march, and in six months made an actual count of a million and a quarter of steps! Thus he got his mind away from brooding on his loss, and his brain into some sort of regular action. After this, who shall say that courage of the highest kind has died out from among men, or that even this sordid and selfish age of ours cannot produce heroes equal to any found in story? He reckons the Nile to be the longest river in the world, but in the measurement he includes, as a part of the great river of Egypt, certain affluents of the lakes out of which it flows: apart from which it might not equal either the Amazon or the Mississippi. There was another man whom it was a pleasure to see walking about the streets of Cairo — M. de Lesseps. He was generally leading a child by the hand, one of his second family, the children of his old age. I had met him in America, and he received me very cordially. To my inquiry as to the comparative difficulties of the two great Interoceanic Canals with which his name is connected, he answered without hesitation, that the difficulties of Suez were far greater than of Panama. The former was built in the desert: there were no means of transportation except the backs of camels, until new approaches were