TO a casual traveller, a couple of days suffice to visit the chief points of interest near Alexandria, while a week becomes almost wearisome in that modernised city. So at least it seemed to us, and we were glad when the hour arrived to start for Cairo.
There certainly is not much romance nowadays in crossing the desert, but, on the whole, perhaps a railway carriage is preferable to a camel's back, and twelve hours are perhaps sufficient to accustom the eye to a dead monotonous flat of sand, sand, sand—then a broad extent of hard pebbly ground, like asphalte pavement, so brightly polished by the incessant friction of the sand, which through long ages has been for ever blowing over it, that each pebble glitters in the sunlight, like fragments of broken mirror—then sand again, only varied by such stunted shrubs as hardly deserve the name of vegetation, though somehow the poor lean camels scent them out by instinct, and here and there we saw a group, scarcely to be distinguished from the sandy world around them, contriving to pick up their scanty living in the desert.
In that hungry land we looked with reverence at their humps, remembering how they are divided into cells, each containing a little store of fat, which in time of starvation is drawn into the stomach, and nourishes the camel, so that at the end of a long march he may be in good cnough condition, though his hump has almost shrunk away. The wonderful cistern stomach is provided with similar cells or pouches, something like honey-comb, which act as a reservoir of pure water, and many instances are known of travellers having been compelled to kill their poor faithful beasts to obtain this and save their own lives. Thus when Bruce, the Abyssinian, was returning to Cairo, the last drop of water, the last crumb of bread had been consumed, and the exhausted camels were scarcely able to stand. The only resource was to kill the two which seemed most utterly unable to proceed, and from their reservoir a precious supply of about four gallons of water was obtained. This, with the flesh of the poor beasts, probably saved the lives of the whole party.
The first few hours of our journey were, however, by no means in the desert. First we were on the edge of beautiful lake Mareotis, along whose reedy shores various sportsmen were looking out for teal, widgeon, and all manner of water-fowl. Snipe especially assemble here in incredible numbers, while tall white or grey cranes and rosy flamingoes stalk along the shallows. Loads of wild flowers blossom near the water, and the quaint ice-plant of our gardens grows here abundantly. The Egyptian water-grasses are quite lovely; silky, silvery plumes with sharp leaves rustling and shimmering as they wave in the light. For miles we passed by sedgy ground where the tall reeds were tossing their grand white feathery heads so joyously in the breeze.
Egyptian reeds of course suggest the old papyrus, and the "paper factories," which once existed at every town in the Delta—each factory having its own specialty by which its goods were known—some producing sheets of paper more than thirty feet long. Is it not strange in these days of cheap stationery to think of a time when both parchment and papyrus had become so rare and so exorbitantly expensive, that both Greeks and Romans were in the habit of using a palimpsest, which was simply some old manuscript with the former writing erased? Thus countless works of authors now celebrated, and whose every word is held priceless in this nineteenth century, were ruthlessly destroyed by their contemporaries. Verily those prophets lacked honour!
Many were the expedients resorted to by the early scribes for the supply of writing materials. There was no scribbling paper whereon to jot down trivial memoranda or accounts, but the heaps of broken pots and crockery of all sorts, which are so abundant in all eastern towns, proved the first suggestion for such china tablets and slates as we now use; and bits of smooth stone or tiles were constantly used for this purpose, and remain to this day. Fragments of ancient tiles thus scribbled on (such tiles as that whereon Ezekiel was commanded to portray the city of Jerusalem) have been found in many places. The-island of Elephantine on the Nile is said to have furnished more than a hundred specimens of these memoranda, which are now in various museums. One of these is a soldier's leave of absence, scribbled on a fragment of an old vase. How little those scribes and accountants foresaw the interest with which learned descendants of the barbarians of the Isles would one day treasure their rough notes!