At all the larger stations women come to the train with roast quails stuffed with rice, which they sell at six-pence apiece, and at every station along the line children bring water in the porous clay bottles of the country.  This latter is badly needed, for the train rattles along most of the time in a stifling cloud of dust, that penetrates the car and settles over one in incredible quantities.

During the afternoon we pass the battle-field of Tel-el-Kebre, the train whisking right through the centre of Arabi Pasha’s earthworks.  Near the battle-field is a little cemetery where the English soldiers killed in the battle were buried.  The cemetery is kept green and tidy, and surrounded by a neat iron fence; amid the gray desert that begins at Tel-el-Kebre this little cemetery is the only bright spot immediately about.  From Tel-el-Kebre to Suez the country is a sandy desert, where sand-fences, like the snow-fences of the Rocky Mountains, have been found necessary to protect the railway from the shifting sand.  On this dreary waste are seen herds of camels, happy, no doubt, as clams at high tide, as they roam about and search for tough camel-thorn shrubs, that here and there protrude above the wavy ridges of white sand.  Put a camel in a pasture of rich, succulent grass and he will roam about with a far-away, disconsolate look and an expression of disgust, but here, on the glaring white sands of the desert with nothing to browse upon but prickly dry shrubs he is in the seventh ’heaven of a camel’s delight.

Very curious it looks as we approach Suez to see the spars and masts of big steamers moving along the ship-canal, close at hand, without seeing anything of the water.  The high dumps, representing the excavations from the canal, conceal everything but the masts and the top of the funnels even when one is close by.

Several days are spent at Suez, waiting for the steamer which we will call the Mandarin, on which I am to take passage to Karachi.  Suez is a wretched hole, although there is a passably good English hotel facing the water-front.  It is the month of Bairam, however, and there is consequently a good deal of picturesque life in the native quarters.

Suez seems swarming with guides, and as I am, for the greater part of a week, the only guest at the hotel, they show me far more attention than a dozen people would know what to do with.  Some want to take me to see the place where Moses struck the rock, others urge me to visit the spot where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea; both these places being suspiciously handy to Suez.

Donkey boys dog one’s footsteps with their long-eared chargers, whenever one ventures outside the hotel.  “I’m the Peninsular and Oriental Donkey Boy, sir, Jimmy Johnson; I have a good donkey, sir, when you want to ride, ask for Jimmy Johnson.”  To all this, sundry seductive offers are added, such as a short trial trip along the bund.