EGYPT IN 1898. I. THE IMPERIAL HIGHWAY. THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL EXPRESS BRITISH EMPIRE- December 11.-Sun? Not much sun here. All day we had been ploughing hoarsely through the monotonous prairie called France. Now at dusk the Peninsular and Oriental Express stood clammily at the little Alpine station of St Jean de Something, a few minutes from the frontier. The huge cube of mountain above, with its sparse firs showing on the table atop, like people on the Monu A ment, was streaked and dappled with snow. On either side of the track the snow was piled a foot deep. As the two upstanding mountain - engines panted and snorted, impatient to get to the top of the Mont Cenis and down into the plain again, half-melting, half-caking snow dribbled down every window. And I a seeker after sun! Ugh! Rather stay and be frozen in one's own country. Yet there are compensations everywhere, and even the P. and O. Express chilling among the Alps offered an experience with its own peculiar flavour. There was nothing externally in the three long sleeping and dining cars and three luggage-vans to mark it off from any of the other "Grand European Expresses" purveyed by the Sleeping-Car Company. The beds were the same -less comfortable than the American model, because on the American plan you have a broad bed, and can undress at ease in the central gangway after the ladies have gone to bed, instead of being boxed up in a fourberth coop with luggage rising up from the WAGONS-LITS FOOD. 3 floor till it threatens to submerge the whole. The food was the same-and when I say that it was the Wagons-Lits food, I say all. It is a class of nourishment wholly by itself, whether you come on it in France, or Hungary, or darkest Turkey. Some like it and some don't. I don't. The brown-uniformed attentive attendants were the same as everywhere — except, it suddenly struck you, that they all talked English. They all talked English-and there you got the clue to the peculiar character of the train. It was altogether an English train. So far it had not embarked a single passenger who was not a Briton. And their trade it was not difficult to see. Fair-haired and blueeyed, square-shouldered and square-jawed, with puckered brows and steadfast eyes that seemed to look outwards and inwards at the same time, self-contained, self-controlled, and self-reliant, they were unmistakably builders -British empire-builders. The faces of the women were serene with the imperturbable serenity of those who have seen too many strange sights to be surprised now at anything; and in their patient aspect was a hint of the tragic heroism that sends its children to be brought up by strangers and forget their mothers. The Empire-builders were going forth to their long work again. This man was going to his collectorship in the Central Provinces, that to his tea - plantation in Assam. This grey-haired merchant was for Brisbane; that pale-faced lady had brought home her children, and was hurrying back to her husband in Hong-Kong. The ruddy subaltern was only going out to have a shot for the Gippy army; but the jolly little man in a wig beside him would not be done till some snail of a local steamer, after many changes, dumped him down under a verandah in Manila. To every point of the remotest East were returning, quite uncomplaining, the obscure makers of the British empire. It was a geography lesson in itself and remember that this train leaves London every Friday night, and that its freight is always the same. Thinking this, |