Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/58

 of the West. The wind, having an unbroken sweep, makes sport of the sand, as it does of snow in Winter, casting it up in huge drifts, like the dunes thrown up by the German Ocean on the coast of Holland.

At eight o'clock in the evening we reached Suez (we had left Cairo at noon), and stopped at the hotel where, with another travelling companion, I had rested for a night six years before, when on the way to India. There is hardly a caravanserai in the world which receives within its doors a more miscellaneous company of travellers, coming and going between Europe and Asia. As we sat at table, Englishmen who had just landed were talking of tiger-hunts in India. A gentleman with whom we had made a pleasant acquaintance in Cairo, was to leave the next morning for Hong Kong. While conversing with him, our dragoman burst in to tells us that the camels had come, and with the Arabs were in camp on the other side of the Gulf of Suez, distant three hours' sail. He wished us to be up at six, and in light marching order for our long journey on the Desert. We begged for an hour's grace, but promptly at seven stepped into the little boat that was lying at the quay; and as our English friends, who were on the balcony of the hotel, waved their handkerchiefs and wished us a happy journey, the Arab boatmen raised their lateen-sail, and we glided softly from the African shore.

But there was still a little formality before we were fairly out of Egypt. For months there had been almost a panic in the East, from dread of the approach of cholera. It had broken out in Mecca, where it was reported that hundreds were dying daily, and from which returning pilgrims had so often brought the cholera or the plague into Western Asia, and so into Europe. A strict police had been kept up on all the lines of approach, and thousands