Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/599

Rh was never more comfortable on board ship in my life. The voyage to Port Said has been so often described that I need not dwell upon it again. We had fair weather for the first five days, and then there was a decided storm, which, however, did not last long. One gets so knocked about in a steamer that baths are impossible; one can only make a hasty toilet at the most, being obliged to hold on to something, or be knocked the while from one end of the cabin to the other; one dines, so to speak, on the balance, with the food ever sliding into one's lap. Our boat danced about throughout the voyage in a most extraordinary manner, which made me think that she had but little cargo. I spent most of the time on deck, "between blue sea and azure air," and I did a good deal of reading. I read Moore's Veiled Prophet of Khorassán and other books, including Lalla Rookh and The Light of the Harím; also Smollett's Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, which I found coarse, but interesting. Some one told me that a course of Smollett was more or less necessary to form one for novel-writing, so I took that and The Adventures of Roderick Random on board to study, in case I should ever write a novel. I felt rather displeased when Smollett's Lady of Quality married her second husband, and quite bouleversée long before I arrived at her fifteenth lover.

Port Said shows itself upon the southern horizon in two dark lines, like long piles or logs of wood lying upon the sea, one large and one small. These are the white town and the black town, apparently broken by an inlet of sea, and based upon a strip of yellow sand.