THE FINEST SIGHT OF ALL.

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their own manhood—yet not a whit prouder than when they marched out a month before. Then the cavalry and the guns and the camel-corps—every arm of the victorious force. And Berber stood by and wondered and exulted. The band crashed and the people yelled. "Lu-u-u, lu-u-u-u" piped the black women, and you could see the brave, savage, simple hearts of the black men bounding to the appeal. And the Sirdar and General Hunter and the others stood above all, calm and commanding; below Bey and Bimbashi led battalion or squadron or battery, in undisturbed self-reliance. You may call the show barbaric if you like: it was meant for barbarians. The English gentleman, if you like, is half barbarian too. That is just the value of him. Here was this little knot of white men among these multitudes of black and brown, swaying them with a word or the wave of a hand upraised. Burned from the sun and red-eyed from the sand, carrying fifteen years' toil with straight backs, bearing living wounds in elastic bodies. They, after all, were the finest sight of the whole triumph-so fearless, so tireless, so confident.

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XX.

EGYPT OUT OF SEASON.

THERE was no difference in Port Said. Ships want coal in July as in December: the black dust hung over the Canal in sullen fog, and the black demons of the pit wailed as they tripped from lighter to deck under their baskets. In the hotel the Levantine clerks and agents took their breakfast in white ducks. under a punkah, but that was all the change. Black island of coal, jabbering island of beggars and touts, forlorn island cranked in by sea and canal and swamp and sand, Port Said in summer was not appreciably more God-forsaken than in the full season.

Ismailia was not appreciably deader than usual. If anything, with half-a-dozen French summer gowns and a French bicycle club, in blue and scarlet jerseys, doing monkey-tricks in front of the station, it was a shade more alive.

In Cairo came the awful change. Cairo the fashionable, the brilliant, was a desolation. When you run into the station in the season, the platform is lined

:

with names of hotels on the gold-laced caps of underporters you can hardly step out for swarms of Arabs, who fight for your baggage. On the night of July 12, the platform showed gaunt and large and empty. The streets were hardly better-a few listless Arabs in the square outside the station, and then avenue on avenue of silent darkness.

By daylight Cairo looked like a ball-room the morning after. One hotel was shamelessly making up a rather battered face against next season. The verandah of Shepheard's, where six months ago you could not move for tea-tables, nor hear the band for the buzz of talk, was quite empty and lifeless; only one perspiring waiter hinted that this was a hotel. The Continental, the centre of Cairene fashion, had a whole wing shuttered up; the mirrors in the great hall were blind with whiting, and naked suites of bedroom furniture camped out in the great dining-room. Some shops were shut; the rest wore demi-toilettes of shutter and blind; the dozing shopkeepers seemed half-resentful that anybody should wish to buy in such weather. As for scarabs and necklaces and curiosities of Egypt, they no longer pretended to think that any sane man could give money for such things. As you looked out from the Citadel, Cairo seemed dazed under the sun; the very Pyramids looked as if they were taking a holiday.

All that was no more than you expected: you knew that no tourists came to Egypt in July. But native

Egypt was out of season too. The streets that clacked with touts and beggars, that jingled with every kind of hawker's rubbish-you passed along them down a vista of closed jalousies and saw not a soul, heard not a sound. The natives must be somewhere, only where? A few you saw at road-making, painting, and the like jobs of an off-season. But every native was dull, listless, hanging from his stalk, half dead. Eyes were languid and lustreless: the painter's head drooped and swayed from side to side, and the brush almost fell from his lax fingers. In the narrow bevel of shadow left under a wall by the high sun, flat on back or face, open-mouthed, half asleep, half fainting, gasped Arab Cairo-the parasite of the tourist in his holiday, the workman leaving his work, donkey-boy and donkey flat and panting together.

Well might they gasp and pant; for the air of Cairo was half dead too. You might drive in it at night and feel it whistle round you, but it did not refresh you. You might draw it into your lungs, but it did not fill them. The air had no quality in it, no body: it was thin, used up, motionless, too limp to live in. The air of August London is stale and close, poor; exaggerate it fifty-fold and you have the air of July Cairo. You wake up at night dull and flaccid and clammy with sweat, less refreshed than when you lay down. You live on what sleep you can pilfer during the hour of dawn. As you drive home at night

you envy the dark figure in a galabeah stretched on the pavement of Kasr-en-Nil bridge; there only in Cairo can you feel a faint stirring in the air.

To put all in one word, Egypt lacks its Nile. The all-fathering river is at his lowest and weakest. In places he is nearly dry, and what water he can give the cracked fields is pale, green, unfertile. He was beginning to rise now, slowly; presently would come the flood and the brown manuring water. The night wind would blow strongly over his broadened bosom, the green would spring out of the mud, and Egypt would be alive again.

Only in one place was she alive yet-and that was the Continental Hotel. Here all day sat and came and went clean-limbed young men in flannels, and at dinner-time the terrace was cool with white messjackets. Outside was the only crowd of natives in Cairo a thick line of Arabs squatting by the opposite wall, nursing testimonials earned or bought, cooks and valets and grooms-waiting to be hired to go up the Nile. Up at the citadel they would show you the great black up-standing 40-pounder guns with which they meant to breach Khartum. Out at Abbassieh the 21st Lancers were changing their troop-horses for lighter Syrians and country-breds. The barrack-yard of Kasr-en-Nil was yellow with tents, and under a breathless afternoon sun the black-belted Rifle Brigade marched in from the station to fill them. The wilted