This farm is very large, and the ostrich-pens are built of mud.  I never had seen ostriches before, and I had no idea how hideous, how big, and how enchanting they are.  They have the most curious agate-colored eyes—­colorless, cold, yet intelligent eyes.  But they are the eyes of a bird without a conscience.  They have no soul, as camels have.  An ostrich looks as if he would really enjoy villainy, as if he could commit crime after crime from pure love of it, and never know remorse; yet there is a fascination about the old birds, and they have their good points.  The father is domestic in spite of looking as if he belonged to all the clubs, and, much to my delight, I saw one sitting on the eggs while the mother walked out and took the air.  Ostriches and Arabs do women’s work with an admirable disregard of Mrs. Grundy.  Ostriches have an irresistible way of waving their lovely plumy wings, and one old fellow twenty-five years old actually imitates the dervishes.  The keeper says to him, “Dance,” and although he is about ten feet tall, he sits down with his scaly legs spread out on each side of him, and, shutting his eyes, he throws his long, ugly red neck from side to side, making a curious grunting noise, and waving his wings in billowy line like a skirt-dancer.  It was too wonderful to see him, and it was almost as revolting as a real dervish.

We saw these dervishes once; nothing could persuade us to go twice—­they were too nasty.  The night the Khedive goes to the Citadel, to the mosque of Mohammed Ali, to pray for his heart’s desire (for on that night all prayers of the faithful are sure to be answered), the dervishes in great numbers are performing their rites.  They are called the howling dervishes, but they do not howl; they only make a horrible grunting noise.  They have long, dirty, greasy hair, and as they throw their bodies backward and forward this hair flies, and sometimes strikes the careless observer in the face.  They work themselves up to a perfect passion of religious ecstasy to the monotonous sound of Arab music, and never have I heard or seen anything more revolting.  The negroes in the South when they “get the power” are not nearly so repulsive.

It is England’s wise policy in all her colonies to have her army take part in the national religious ceremonies, so when the Sacred Carpet started from the Citadel on its journey to Mecca there was a magnificent military display.

It is an odd thing to call it a carpet, for it not only is not a carpet in itself, but it is not the shape of a carpet, it is not used for a carpet, and does not look like a carpet.

We were among the fortunate ones who were invited to the private view of it the night before, when the faithful were dedicating it.  They sat on the floor, these Mohammedans, rocking themselves back and forth, and chanting the Koran.  I believe the reason nearly all Arabs have crooked legs is because they squat so much.  One cannot have straight legs when one uses one’s legs to sit down on for hours at a time.  They always sit in the sun, too, and that must bake them into their crookedness.