February 15th.  This day we had an excursion to the Petrified Forest.  It was got up partly to give us all a taste of camel-riding, and it was originally expected that everybody would go on camels; then it was agreed that half should go on camels, and “ride-and-tie.”  In this view, one camel and one donkey were ordered for T. and myself.  But Mr. B. was subsequently persuaded that with four horses he could have a carriage dragged through the desert to the forest, which would be more comfortable for the ladies; and he made that arrangement in his own and their behalf.  Freddy B. is a first-rate horseman, and an Arab steed was ordered for him.  Mr. Buckle was determined to go in a thing called a mazetta, a sort of huge bedstead with curtains, borne on the back of a camel, big enough to carry a small family, in which he expected to find room for himself and the two boys travelling with him.  Besides these, the party included the Reverend Mr. Lansing, the excellent head of the American mission here, the Honorable W.S., a young Englishman, and his tutor, the Reverend Mr. S., whose agreeable company had been bespoken when the camel-project was in full strength.

On looking down from the balcony at the transportation-train marshalled for the occasion, amid the admiring gaze of all the idlers of Cairo, I was at first a little chagrined to find, as the final result of the various arrangements, that, besides the camels, the mazetta, the carriage-and-four, and the proud-stepping horse, there appeared but one donkey, that selected for me.  But I was, in truth, very well off.  To begin with, it was not thought prudent that Mr. Buckle should use the mazetta until the procession had got beyond the narrow streets of Cairo, lest the camel bearing it should take fright and knock the whole thing to pieces against the wall of a house.  Accordingly, he and his charges took donkeys, and I rode off with them, at the head of the column.  By-and-by Mr. Buckle changed to the conveyance originally proposed, but a very short experiment (literally, I suspect) sickened him of the mazetta, whose motion is precisely that of a ship in a storm, and he sent back to the town for donkeys.  At the next halt the ladies took him into the carriage, where he found himself, as he said, “in clover,” and that was the end of his greatness in camel-riding.  This remark, by the way, suggested a name ("Clover”) for our boat in our voyage up the Nile just afterwards; but patriotism prevailed, and we named her “Union.”  It pretty soon appeared that the camel which T. was riding was young and frisky; the animal was accordingly pronounced unsafe, and T. changed to a donkey which had fortunately been brought along for a reserve.  The Honorable W.S.’s camel, from the saddle becoming unfastened, pitched rider and saddle to the ground, a fall of five or six feet:  fortunately no harm was done, and he bravely mounted again.  The saddle upon the camel which the Reverend Mr. S.