dially received by a handsome young man, who was in the act of building himself a mansion on the bank, to which, as it was nearly finished, he invited us. Here we found assembled the kadi, the Sheikh el Beled, and sundry other notables, who all sat in a circle, and smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee; but the figure that immediately arrested our attention was a remarkably silent, dignified individual, of about fifty, who smoked the old-fashioned chibouk, and had altogether the tranquil air of the Eastern grand seigneur, rarely to be met with in these degenerate days. This proved to be no less a personage than Hassabalu Abou Sakr, the sheikh of all the Bedouin tribes who wander over the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, from Suez to Kosseir. Even he was becoming tainted by civilisation; for he told us he lived in a house lower down the river, and only took his tents and made his circuit through the tribes once every two or three years. He assured us, that, if need be, he could call out 4000 fighting men. We made arrangements with our host—who insisted upon sending down an ample dinner, ready cooked, to our dahabeeya-to visit the celebrated tombs of Beni Hassan the next morning, and were just retiring to rest when we were roused by the cries of women, the screaming of children, the oaths of men, and the barking of dogs on the bank above us. I immediately rushed out to ascertain the cause of the riot, and found that apparently the whole village, of all ages and both sexes, had turned out to have a free fight on the open space under the date-trees on the riverbank. I forthwith sent to our friend to tell him what was going on, and some men armed with authority and sticks soon appeared upon the scene and put a stop to the row. I am bound to say that the women seemed the most active combatants, and the most reluctant to give in. I discovered afterwards that the quarrel had originated in a domestic squabble, which had culminated in the husband beating his wife, on which her relatives interfered, and the whole village took sides. I asked whether there was much wife-beating among the natives of Egypt; and from what I could learn, it seems to be almost as common a pastime with them as it is with the natives of England. On the following morning we pulled across the river, accompanied by our entertainer and all his guests of the night before, and our picturesque cavalcade soon scrambled up the cliff to the tombs of Beni Hassan, which are too familiar to Nile tourists to need description; but they were still objects of mystery and wonder to those by whom I was accompanied, though they lived in their immediate neighbourhood. They clustered round in a most attentive and interested group, when, standing amid the handsome columns in the tomb of Ameni, I explained to them his history, finally reading to them the translation of the inscription in hieroglyphics (out of Murray), in which this distinguished administrator says: "The hungry did not exist in my time, even when there were years of famine. For, behold, I ploughed all the fields of Sah to its frontiers both north and south; thus I found food for its inhabitants, and I gave them whatever it produced. There were no hungry people in it. I gave equally to the widow as to the married woman. I did not prefer a great personage to a humble man in all that I gave away; and when the inundations of the Nile |