One fine morning, some two weeks after my introduction to Tom, I left my post in the consul’s household, and set about making plans for a journey up the Nile. For I knew that if I once journeyed up or down this river with open eyes, I would know all there is to know about this long and narrow country.

I left Cairo on foot, and, crossing the Nile, turned southward along a ridge of shifting sand beyond the village of Gizeh. There was an irrigating ditch near the ridge. Scores of natives, moving with the regularity of machinery, were ceaselessly dipping the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt. Between the canal and the sparkling Nile, groups of Egyptian farmers, called fellahs, deaf to the fiery sunshine, set out sugar-cane, or clawed the soil of the dry plain. On the desert wind rode the never-ceasing squawk of the Egyptian water-wheel.

Beyond the Pyramids of Sakkara I found shelter in the palm groves where the ancient city of Memphis once stood, and took my noonday sleep on the statue of King Rameses which lies at full length there. When I was returning to the sandy road, a whole village of dark-faced people came running up, and tried to head me off and make me give them baksheesh. They forced me to run a gauntlet of outstretched arms. It is the national song of Egypt, this cry of baksheesh. Workmen at their labor, women bound for market, children rooting in the streets, drop everything to crowd around the traveler who may be coaxed to “sprinkle iron” among them. Even the unclothed infant astride a mother’s shoulder thrusts forth a dimpled hand to the passing white man, with a gurgle of “sheesh.”

As darkness came on I reached the town of Magoonza. I spent the night in a railway station. The next day I took the third-class coach, and halted near noonday in the wind-swept village of Beni Suef. A young Englishman who was called “Bromley, Pasha, Inspector of Irrigation,” agreed to meet me on the bank of the canal beyond the village. Long after dark he appeared on horseback, attended by two natives who carried flaming torches. After being ferried across the canal, he led the way toward his dahabeah (winged house-boat), which was anchored at the shore of the Nile.

“I fancied I’d find something to put you at,” he explained, turning his horse over to a jet-black servant who popped up out of the darkness. “But I didn’t, and the last train’s gone. I’ll buy you a ticket to Assiut in the morning.”

“I have a ticket,” I put in.

“Oh,” said the Englishman. “Well, you’ll stay with me here to-night, anyway.”

He led the way across the plank into his floating residence. The change from the windy plain of African sand to this floating palace was as strange as if Bromley, Pasha, had been the owner of Aladdin’s lamp. Richly turbaned servants in spotless white gowns sprang forward to greet their master; to place a chair for him; to pull off his riding-boots and to put on his slippers; to slip the Cairo “daily” into his hands; and then to speed noiselessly away to finish preparing the evening meal.

Breakfast over next morning, I returned to the village, and left on the south-bound train. The third-class coach was packed with natives huddled together with unmanageable bundles. Three gloomy Arabs, who had no room to squat on the floor, perched themselves on a bench at the side of the car like fowls on a roost. The air that swept through the open car was almost wintry. Only the faces of the men were uncovered. The women, wrapped like mummies in fold after fold of black gowns, crouched on the floor, so motionless that one could hardly tell which were women and which were bundles.

At every station peddlers of food swarmed around the train. Dates, boiled eggs, baked fish, oranges, and soggy bread-cakes—enough to feed an army—were thrust upon all who dared to look outside. From the neighboring fields came workmen loaded down with freshly cut bundles of sugar-cane. They looked like a forest in motion. Three great canes, as long and unmanageable as bamboo fishing-rods, sold for a piaster, and almost every native in the car bought at least a half dozen.

The canes were broken into pieces two feet long; and each native, grasping a piece in his hands, bit into it and, jerking his head from side to side like a bulldog, tore off a strip. Then, with a suckling that could be heard above the roar of the train, he drew out the juice and cast the pulp on the floor about him. The pulp dried rapidly, and by noonday the floor of the car was carpeted with a sugar-cane mat several inches thick.

I spent the night at the largest city in upper Egypt—Assiut. Long before daylight next morning I rose and groped my way back through the darkness to the station. A ticket to Luxor took less than half my money. I boarded the train and once more started south. At break of day the railway crossed to the eastern bank of the river, and at the next station the train stood motionless while engineer, trainmen, and passengers went outside and performed their morning prayers in the desert sand. Beyond, the chimneys of great sugar factories puffed forth dense clouds of smoke, and at every stopping-place shivering small boys offered for sale cone-shaped lumps of sugar, dark-brown in color.

The voice of the south spoke more clearly with every mile. We were now coming to the district where rain and dew were unknown. The desert grew more dry and parched; the whirling sand became finer, until it sifted through one’s very clothing. The natives, already of a darker shade than the cinnamon-colored Cairene, grew blacker and blacker. The chilling wind of two days before turned warm, then piping hot; and before we drew into Luxor, Egypt lay, as of old, under her glittering covering of gleaming sunshine.

Before me were two great European hotels filled with tourists. And close by the station was an inn for penniless wanderers. It was a tumble-down shack wherein, dreaming away his old age over a cigarette, sat Pietro Saggharia. Pietro was a wanderer once. His stories of “the road,” collected during forty years of roaming about in Africa, and told in almost any language the listener may choose, are to be had for a kind word.

I left my knapsack in Pietro’s keeping, and struck off toward Karnak. Tourists go to Karnak to see what is left of many temples there. The principal temple is that built in honor of Ammon, a being that the Egyptians once worshiped. Ammon was an imaginary creature with the body of a man and the head and horns of a ram. He was supposed to be very wise and able to answer any question asked of him. His temple was once magnificent, having immense columns, carvings, sculptures, and paintings, placed there by his worshipers.

I did not expect to see the inside of the famous temples, for I had no ticket. The price of such a ticket is little short of a vagabond’s fortune. I journeyed to Karnak, therefore, with my mind made up to be content with a view of her row of sphinxes and a walk around her outer walls.

Natives swarmed about me, calling for “baksheesh.” Before I had shaken off the last screeching youth I came upon a great iron gate that shut out the un-ticketed, and paused to peer through the bars. On the ground before the gate squatted a sleek, well fed native. He arose and told me he was the guard, but made no attempt to drive me off.

As I turned away he said in Arabic: “You don’t see much from here. Have you already seen the temple? Or perhaps you have no ticket?”

“No; no ticket,” I answered in Arabic. “Therefore I must stay outside.”

“Ah! Then you are no tourist?” smiled the native. “Are you English?”

“Aywa,” I answered, for the Arabic term “Inglesi” means all who speak that language; “but no tourist, merely a working-man.”

“Ah,” sighed the guard: “too bad you are an Inglesi, then; for if you spoke French the superintendent who has the digging done is a good friend of working-men. But he speaks no English.”

“Where shall I find him?”

“In the office just over the hill, there.”

I went in the direction pointed out, and came upon a small office before which an aged European sat motionless in a rocking-chair. About him were scattered many kinds of statues, broken and whole.

“Are you the superintendent, sir?” I asked in French.

The aged Frenchman frowned, but answered not a word. I repeated the question in a louder voice.

“Va t’en!” shrieked the old man, grasping a heavy cane that leaned against his chair, and shaking it feebly at me. “Go away! You’re a beggar. I know you are.”

I told him I had mistaken him for the superintendent. The aged Frenchman watched me with the half-closed eyes of a cat, clinging to his stick.

“Why do you want to see the superintendent?” he demanded.

“To work, if he has any. If not, to see the temple.”

“You will not ask him for money?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well! It is there. Maghmood!” he coughed.

A native appeared at the door of the shanty.

“My son is the superintendent,” said the old man, showing a maze of wrinkles meant for a smile. “Follow Maghmood.”

The son, a polite young Frenchman clothed in the thinnest of white trousers and an open shirt, was bowed over a small stone covered with ancient Egyptian figures. I told him why I had come.

“Work?” he replied. “No. Unfortunately, the society allows us to hire only natives. I wish I might have a few Europeans to look after the digging. But I am pleased to find a workman interested in the ruins. You are as free to go inside as if you had a ticket. But it is midday now. How do you escape a sunstroke, with only that cap? You had better sit here in the shade until the heat dies down a bit.”

I assured him that the Egyptian sun did not trouble me, and he stepped to the door to shout an order to the well fed gate-keeper just out of sight over the hill. That official grinned knowingly as I appeared, unlocked the gate, and, pushing back with one hand several small black boys who were racing about, let me in to the noonday quiet of the forest of pillars.

As the shadows began to grow long, a flock of sheep rushed into the sacred place, and, stumbling through the ruins, awoke the sleeping echoes with their bleating. They were trying to get to their shepherds, who were calling to them in voices that sounded like phonographs. After they had left, there came more peaceful beings weighed down with cameras and note-books. Everybody was interested in one lively corner of the place. There, in the latest hollow dug, an army of men and boys toiled at the machines that raised the sand and the water which had been poured into the pit to loosen the soil. Other natives, naked, groped in the mud at the bottom, eager to win the small reward offered to the discoverer of each ancient treasure buried in the earth.

One such prize was captured in the afternoon. A small boy, half buried in mud and water, suddenly stopped wallowing about, and uttered a shrill shriek of joy. He came dangerously near being trampled out of sight by his fellow workmen. In a twinkling half the band, amid a mighty roar of shouting and splashing, was tugging at some heavy object hidden from view in the mud.

They raised it at last—a woman’s figure in blue stone, about four feet in length. The news of the discovery was quickly carried to the shanty on the hill. In a great white helmet that made him look like a walking toad-stool, the superintendent hurried down to the edge of the pit, and gave orders that the statue be carried to a level space, where a crowd of excited tourists lay in wait with open note-books. There it was carefully washed with sponges, while the tourists stood gazing eagerly at it. Then it was placed on a car of the tiny railway laid among the ruins. Crowds of natives grasped the long rope attached to the car, and, moving in time to a wild Arabic song of rejoicing, dragged the new find through the temple and placed it at the feet of the aged Frenchman.

As evening fell I turned back to my lodging-place. Several lodgers had gathered, but neither they nor Pietro could tell me anything about the land across the Nile, which I meant to visit next day.

There is another ruined temple near Luxor. Although it is a mile north of Karnak, it was once connected with the temples of that town by an avenue bordered on either side with ram-headed sphinxes. The temple is of sandstone, and until the digging for it was begun in 1883 it was entirely buried in sand and rubbish. About it six enormous statues of an Egyptian king are still standing.

No one at the inn could tell me anything about the ruins that the tourists came to see. The Greek keeper of the inn knew nothing of the ruins of Thebes except the story of a man who had once stopped at his hotel. This man had tried to make the excursion, and had returned wild with thirst, mumbling a confused tale of having floundered about in a sea of sand.

“For our betters,” said Pietro, in the softened Italian in which he chose to address me, “for the rich ladies and gentlemen who can ride on donkeys and be guarded by many guides, a visit to Thebes is very well. But common folk like you and me! Bah! We are not wanted there. They would send no army to look for us if we disappeared in the desert. Besides, you must have a ticket to see anything.”

I rose at dawn the next morning, and hastened away to the bazaars to get food for the day’s trip—bread-cakes for hunger and oranges for thirst. A native boatman tried to charge me ten piasters for rowing me to the other side; but when I refused to pay him that much, he accepted one instead, and set me down on the western bank. The shrill screams of a troop of donkey-boys, who were crossing the river with their animals, greeted the rising sun. A moment later a party of tourists, wearing veils and helmets, stepped ashore from a steamer, and, mounting the animals, sped away into the trackless desert. It was an interesting sight. The half-mile train of donkeys that trailed off across the desert was bestridden by every kind of European, from thin scholars and slender maidens to heavy women and mighty masses of men, who had to beat their animals continually to make them keep up with the rest.

The sharp climb to the Tomb of the Kings was more difficult to an overburdened ass than to a man on foot. I kept pace with the band, and even got ahead of the stragglers, often stopping to shake the sand from my shoes. Even though the jeering donkey-boys kept pushing me into the narrow gorges between the rocks, it was I who reached the gate first. An Arabian policeman was on hand to help the keeper take tickets. But he spoke Italian, and was so delighted to find that he could talk with me without being understood by the rest of the crowd that he gave me permission to enter.

I was now so used to such places that I was able to find my way about alone. I left the party and struck southward toward a steep cliff of stone and sand. To go past this, those on donkeys had to make a circuit of many miles; but I made up my mind to climb over it. Clinging to sharp edges of rock, I began the climb. Half way up, a roar of voices sounded from the plain below. I felt for a safer hand-hold and looked down. About the policeman at the foot of the cliff was grouped the party of Europeans, gazing upward—certain now, no doubt, of their earlier belief that I was a madman who had escaped from his guardians. Before they had gone one fourth the distance around the mountain, I had reached the top, while they had still many a weary mile to travel.

The view that spread out from the top of that mountain was one that might have awakened the envy of the tourists below. North and south stretched sand-colored hills, deep and brilliant vermilion in the valleys, the highest peaks splashed blood-red by the sunshine. Below lay the plain of Thebes, its thick green carpet weighted down by a few farm villages and the great heavy playthings of an ancient people. As I looked off before me, an old saying came to my mind: “Egypt is the Nile.” Clinging tightly to the life-giving river, easily seen in that clear air for a hundred miles, the slender hand of Egypt looked like a spotless ribbon of richest green, following every curve of the Father of Waters. All else to the east and to the west was nothing but an endless sea of choking yellow sand.

I climbed down, and spent the afternoon among the ruins at the edge of the plain. I had examined almost everything before the tourists, worn out and drooping from a day in the saddle, overtook me, and I went on before them to the bank of the river. There they shook me off, however. The guides in charge of the party snarled in anger when I offered to pay for crossing the river in the company boat. There was nothing else for me to do, much as I disliked the idea, but to be ferried over with the donkeys.

I left next day on the train for Assuan, and reached that place in time to hear the afternoon concert. I was now nearly six hundred miles from the last “hotel” for homeless wanderers, and I was again obliged to go to a native inn and to put up with the companionship of half-savage Arabians. But my bedroom on the roof was airy, and the bawling of the priest who stood on the balcony of a Mohammedan church steeple calling out the hour of prayer awoke me early enough to see the glorious sunrise of a new day.

Some miles beyond Assuan lay the new dam, where there was work for any one who wanted it. Just how far, I could not know; neither did I know that it was connected with the village by rail. From morning till high noon I clawed my way along the ragged rocks overhanging the weakened falls of the river, before I came in sight of the great dam that had robbed them of their waters.

This dam was built by the British for the purpose of irrigating the surrounding country. Among the rocks in what was once the bed of the Nile sat a dozen wooden shanties for the workmen. But I had arrived too late. The superintendent of the work told me that the dam had been completed that very day, and he and his men were going back to England in the morning.

I still had left fifty piasters, so I decided to push on up the Nile.

I came to the end of the railway. But steamers left twice a week from Shellal, a town above the dam. At the landing a swarm of natives were loading a rickety old barge, and a native agent was dozing behind the bars of a home-made ticket-office.

“Yes,” he yawned, in answer to my question; “there is to-night leaving steamer. Soon be here. The fare is two hundred fifty piasters.”

“Two hundred!” I gasped. “Why, that must be first-class.”

“Yes, very first-class. But gentleman not wish travel second-class?”

“Certainly not. Give me a third-class ticket.”

The Egyptian jumped to his feet and stared at me through the bars.

“What say gentleman? Third-class! No! No! Not go third-class. Second-class one hundred thirty piasters very poor.”

“But there is a third-class, isn’t there?”

“Third-class go. Forty piasters. But only for Arabs. White man never go third-class. Not give food, not give sleep, not ride on steamer; ride on barge there, tied to steamer with string. All gentlemen telling me must have European food. Gentlemen not sleep with boxes and horses on barge? Very Arab; very bad smell.”

“Yes, I know; but give me a third-class ticket,” I interrupted, counting out forty piasters.

The native blinked, sat down sadly on his stool, and with a sigh reached for a ticket. Suddenly his face lighted up, and he pushed my money back to me.

“If white man go third-class,” he crowed, “must have pass. Not can sell ticket without.”

“But how can I get a pass?”

“There is living English colonel with fort the other side of Assuan. Can get pass from him.”

I hurried away to the railroad station. The fare to Assuan was a few cents, and one train went each way during the afternoon. But it made the up trip first! I struck out on foot down the railroad, raced through Assuan, and tore my way to the fort, which was three miles below the village. A squad of black men dressed in khaki uniforms flourished their bayonets uncomfortably near my ribs. I bawled out my errand in Arabic, and an officer waved the guard aside.

“The colonel is sleeping now,” he said; “come this evening.”

“But I want a pass for this evening’s steamer.”

“We cannot wake the colonel.”

“Is there no one else who can sign the order?”

“Only the colonel. Come this evening.”

Pass or no pass, I would not be cheated out of a journey into the Soudan. I threw my knapsack over my shoulder again, and pranced off for the third time on the ten-mile course between Assuan and Shellal. Night was falling as I rushed through Assuan. When I stepped aside to let the down train pass, my legs wabbled under me like two rubber tires from which half the air had escaped. The screech of a steamboat whistle resounded through the Nile valley as I came in sight of the lights of Shellal. I broke into a run, falling now and then on the uneven ground.

The sky was clear, but there was no moon, and the night was black in spite of the stars. The deck-hands were already casting off the shore lines of the barge, and the steamer was churning the shallow water. I pulled off my coat, threw it over my head after the fashion in which the Egyptian fellah wears his gown after nightfall, and dashed toward the ticket office.

“A ticket to Wady Haifa,” I gasped in Arabic, trying to imitate the timid tone of the Egyptian peasant.

For once, I saw a native hurry. The agent glanced at the money, snatched a ticket, and thrust it through the bars, crying: “Hurry up; the boat is go—” But the white hand that clutched the ticket showed him who I was. He sprang to the door with a howl: “Stop! It’s the faranchee! Come back—”

I caught up my knapsack as I ran, made a flying leap at the slowly moving barge, and landed on all fours under the feet of a troop of horses.

An Arab who stood grinning at me as I picked myself up seemed to be the only man on the craft who had noticed how suddenly I had boarded the vessel. He was dressed in native clothes, save for a tightly buttoned khaki jacket which he wore over his gown. His legs were bare, his feet thrust into red slippers. About his head was wound a large turban of red and white checks: on each cheek were the scars of three long gashes; in the top of his right ear hung a large silver ring.

The scars and ring showed him to be a Nubian; the jacket, an officer of cavalry; the bridle in his hand showed him to be care-taker of the horses; and of course his name was Maghmood!

We became great chums, Maghmood and I, before the journey ended. By night we shared the same blanket; by day he would have divided the lunch in his saddle-bag with me had I been without food. But the black men who trooped down to each landing with baskets of native food kept me supplied with all I needed. Maghmood told me tales of the time he was in the battle-field with Kitchener, in a clear-cut Arabic that even a faranchee could understand; and, except for the five periods each day when he stood barefoot at his prayers, he was as pleasant a companion as any one from the Western world could have been.

When morning broke I climbed a rickety ladder to the upper deck. It was so closely packed from rail to rail with Arabs huddled together that a poodle could not have found room to sit on his haunches. I climbed still higher, and came out upon the roof of the barge. No one else was there. From that height I could view the vast moving picture of the Nile.

There was nothing growing on its banks. The fertile strips of green fed by the dippers and the squawking waterwheels had been left behind. Except for a few tiny oases, the desert had pushed its way to the very water’s edge, here sloping down in beaches of the softest sand, there falling sheer into the stream in rugged, rocky cliffs. Yet somewhere in this yellow wilderness a hardy people found a living. Now and then a dark-faced peasant waved a hand or a tattered flag from the shore, and the steamer ran her nose high up on the beach to pick up the bale of produce that he rolled down the slope. At every landing a troop of dark barbarians sprang up from a sandy nowhere, making in the gorgeous sunlight wild-looking shadows as black as their leathery skins.

We tied up at Wady Haifa after nightfall. I landed the next morning. In two days I saw everything there was to see in Wady Haifa, and decided to return to Cairo.

On a Monday morning I boarded the steamer Cleopatra as a deck passenger, and drifted lazily down the Nile for five days, landing here and there with the tourists of the upper deck to visit a temple or a mud village. In Cairo, at the Asile Rudolph, Captain Stevenson welcomed me with open arms. A day later I called on the superintendent of the railway, and, armed with a pass to Port Said, bade the capital farewell.