mount, I laid my hand as carelessly and leisurely upon the front stake as if my camel had been a

COW.

But scarcely had my right foot left the earth on its meditative way to the other side of the saddle, than the camel snorted, threw back his head, and sprang up as nimbly as a colt.

I, meanwhile, was left dangling with the blue cotton umbrella, and the water jugs at the side, several feet from the ground, and made an abortive grasp at the rear stake. But I only clutched the luxuries, and down we fell, Howadji, pocketpistols, umbrella, and water jugs in a confused heap.

The good commander arrived at the scene as soon as the arsenal permitted, and swore fiercely at the Arabs from the midst of his net-work of weapons. Then, very blandly, he instructed me in the mystery of camel-climbing, and in a few minutes we were on the way to Jerusalem

III.

OUTSKIRTS.

WITH the first swing of the camel, Egypt and the Nile began to recede. With this shuttle the desert was to be woven into the web of my life. To share that moment's feeling, sympathetic reader, you must recall the change of horses at La Storta, the last post to Rome, and gild the sensation with oriental glory.

We paced through the outskirts of the city. The streets were narrow and dirty as we approached the gate, although they wound under beautiful lattices, and palms drooped over the roofs. Sore-eyed children played around the houses. Barbers were shaving men who kneeled and rested their heads in the barber's lap. Flabby women, in draggling, coarse veils, and scant, filthy garments, loitered by, with trays of thin cakes upon their heads.

Through the grated windows of the mosque, we saw the silent devotee steeped in the red light of the westering sun, and dreaming in his squalid rags, which the sun's golden finger touched into a gor

geous robe, of the paradise where "the comely of countenance" should, even so, surfeit his lean soul with bliss.

"For thus," says quaint old Burton of the Saracen, "he fats himself with future joys."

We rode superior to the scene, upon our lofty camels. They swayed gently along, and occasion ally swung their heads and long necks awkwardly aside to peer through the lattices, and suffer their eyes to browse upon hidden beauty, as the “large, calm eyes" of the sea-snake feed upon the mermaid, in Tennyson's poem.

The old silence and sadness, whose spell I had constantly felt in Cairo, brooded over "the superb town, the holy city," to the last. As we passed out of the gate into the desert, no hope called after

us.

The suburbs of "the mother of the world" are tombs. In the desert, death beleaguers the city, and you can well fancy that the melancholy genius of the people seeks to propitiate the awful enemy by these stately and solitary buildings, grouped beyond the walls in the sand. Even as Andromeda, the king's own child, was exposed to the common foe, so, upon these wild sands, instinctive nature seems to aim at appeasing the hereditary enemy, by the beautiful persuasion of art. These tombs

are of the finest oriental architecture. They hold the ashes of sultans and caliphs whose names are remembered by nothing else. They are mosques no less than tombs, and travellers, leaving or entering the city, pause in them to pray.

But their austerity is unrelieved by the gladness of any green thing. Over our western graves, we love the sweet consolations of nature; and the year, changing from flower to fading leaf, in gracious imagery renews forever the mystery of life, and, with almost human sympathy, insists upon immortality. But the changeless year glides unsympathizing over Arabian graves. He is doubly dead, who is buried in the desert.

As we advanced, we saw more plainly the blank sand that overspread the earth, from us to the eastern horizon. Out of its illimitable reaches paced strings of camels, with swarthy Arabs. Single horsemen, and parties upon donkeys, ambled quietly by. The huge white plaster palace, which Abbas Pacha was building upon the edge of the desert, swarmed with workmen, and his army of boys was encamped upon the sands beyond. Our path lay northward, along the line where the greenness of the Nile-valley blends with the desert. There was a little scant shrubbery upon the sides of the way-groves of mimosa, through which stretched

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the light sand, almost like a road; and towards the west lay the gardens of Shoobra, a summer palace of Mehemet Ali, palm-fringed along the shore.

As the sun set, I turned upon my camel, and saw Grand Cairo for the last time.

One summer day, in Switzerland, as I climbed the Faulhorn, I saw suddenly in a dark tarn below me the unbroken image of the snow-summitted Wetterhorn, which was miles away, beyond the valley of Grindelwald. Every point of each solitary snowspire glittered entire, and the tarn was filled with the majestic apparition. So lay the vision of cathedral sublimity, pure, perfect, and impossible, in the mind of Michael Angelo.

But here the dream of a different genius was made visible. If that was grand and austere, how exquisite was this! The delicate grace of the grove of minarets clustering in the glowing sunset, revealed the image of an eastern poet's mind, and the voice of the muezzin that vibrated to our ears and died in a tranquil heaven, touched them as tenderly as the aerial outline struck the eye.

Many an evening I had floated upon the lagune of Venice, homeward from the Lido. But the rocking gondola that bore me to the feet of the Queen of the Adriatic is not more passionately