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land, untutored in the minutiae of its history, and fairly uncritical of orthography so long as the names employed serve to convey a definite idea of an undoubted personage, place, or period. With which prefatory statement, let me turn for a moment to such introductory remarks on Egyptian travel as may seem likely to be useful to the individual "sowâh."

The vast majority of people who visit Egypt do so, I suppose, because of the intense historic interest of the country and because of the overmastering antiquity of its surviving monuments and mummies. Competent authority now awards to Egypt the honor of being the source and origin of our modern civilization, preferring its claim thereto above the claims of the valley of the Euphrates. A minority go there for serious study of ancient customs and ancient art. Still others seek the valley of the Nile for the purpose of escaping the rigors of a Northern winter or with the design of recovering health which the inclemency of other climates has impaired. All of which brings us by easy stages to a word on the climate of Egypt and to a word of caution as well which may not be amiss.

The impression prevails, and no doubt justly, that Egypt is a notable health resort. Nevertheless it will be well, before we proceed too enthusiastically to embrace the delights of a winter on the Nile, to realize

that Egypt is prone to exact the full penalty of the imprudent. Mild her winters certainly are. Her spring is the most delightful season imaginable. Even the heat of her summer is compensated by the luxury of cool and restful nights. But the fact remains that, however healthful her climate, one is not freed from the necessity of due care; and that the alternations between the heat of high noon and the chill of early evening possess their full share of dangers for the unwary. A climate that calls for tennis flannels at midday and a fur-lined wrap in the evening is often delightful, but one must respect its demands in the way of clothing and conduct. Properly used, Egypt is capable of bearing length of days in her right hand. Imprudently trifled with, she is as inexorable as New England herself. And the greatest danger of the Egyptian climate is, I am convinced, to those robust souls whose bodily vigor and boasted indifference to variations of temperature elsewhere lead them into carelessness in Cairo, or on the upper river.

It is common to refer to the climate of Egypt as rainless, and to all intents and purposes that is true. Like all generalizations, however, it is dangerous. It may rain as hard in Cairo as in any other city of the earth. Showers are not unknown in the interior and sometimes come up with startling suddenness. But

it is still true that rain is very infrequent; and as far as concerns the upper Nile it is fair to say that almost every day may be depended upon to be fine, save for the occasional intervention of the "khamasin," or desert wind, which commonly brings not rain, but clouds of dust and sand. The sand-storm is not the least interesting phenomenon of the country. It may come from either desert-the Libyan, to the southwest, or the Arabian, to the east. In either case it is sure to be a hot wind, and the air is certain to be thick with the flying dust. On the edge of the desert the particles cut like fine snow, and facing the khamasin is anything but a delight. A genuinely hot one produces a curious dryness - so intense that the ink in one's pen is dried before it can be put to paper.

The word "khamasin"—and here again one is choosing one of several spellings and is inserting an initial "k" which has almost no vocal sound at all - means simply "fifty." Mohammedans claim that it is so called because it blows most fiercely during "the Christian fast," or Lent, which they apparently conceive to be about fifty days long. But it is quite capable of blowing at other seasons, and its name may be set down to the fact that it is most to be dreaded in March, at which season it seems to be most oppressive as well as most persistent. The first

genuine khamasin generally suffices to start the tourists homeward from Luxor, and by the end of March the hostelries of the upper Nile resorts are sadly depopulated and, indeed, mainly closed. Nothing more trying than a furious and long-continued duststorm could well be found in all the traditional plagues of Egypt, but when one has dismissed it from the table of his narration the worst has been said of the country's climate. Let it not be assumed that the khamasin is unduly frequent, or insupportable. On the contrary, it is highly interesting to watch as it sweeps in resistless billows of dust from the river cliffs and whirls across the waters and the narrow plain. It is scarcely more depressing than its bloodbrother, the scirocco; and is it not one of the things that one goes out to Egypt "for to see"? Shall we condemn the rose for its thorn?

Travel in Egypt is probably simpler than in any other country on the whole surface of the globe. The reason is that, with the unimportant exception of certain unfrequented oases and the broad open plains of the Delta, Egypt is nothing but an attenuated ribbon of vivid green, winding down for something like a thousand miles through an illimitable and desolate desert, a ribbon of green which is seldom as much as thirty miles in breadth, and beyond whose edges the ordinary traveler is never called upon to

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go. For the tourist, Egypt means simply the immediate borders of the Nile. East and west are eliminated entirely from his problems. He is concerned alone with north and south. With the Delta, despite its marvelous fertility, he will have practically nothing to do. What monuments that portion of Egypt may once have boasted as referring to the ancient civilization have either vanished under the hand of an obelisk-hunting generation or have sunk to oblivion in the accretions of Nile mud.

To be sure, one may make an expedition with camels across the burning sands to the fertile inland district of the Fayum, and a railroad of sorts now serves to convey the curious to the deep-lying oasis of Khargeh, which may yet become a spot of common visitation. But apart from these, the visitor will have practically no alternatives save such as are presented by a limited choice of means in going up the river, and by the determination of what sights he will see and what omit in the long and narrow strip that stretches from Cairo to the Second Cataract. By far the greatest number are content to go no farther south than Assuan, even though thereby one is forced to miss the famous rock-temple of Abu Simbel. On the whole, indeed, that is enough. In the winding valley between the First Cataract and Cairo was enacted the major part of the great drama of our

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