CHAPTER XIV.

THE OMNIBUSES OF THE LAND OF GOSHEN.

THE bleakly monotonous voyage from Aden to Egypt is fitly ended by the desert city at which the voyager lands. Suez, like Aden, is a city sui generis, not probably to be found paralleled elsewhere. Yet it is most unlike Aden. Here there are no frowning mountains of volcanic rock, no wild scenery that puts one in mind of the debris of giants' battles. All is level, or merely undulating, far as the eye can reach-undulating sand, unvaried desert. For miles out to sea from the town itself, the water is so shallow, that the boatmen who convey the passengers a-shore from the steamer, are as often pushing their unwieldy craft along with their hands, whilst they wade

over the soft yellow sand, as they are sitting quietly within it, rowing, or walking to and fro, shoving it on with long poles.

The extremity of the Suez Gulf of the Red Sea sweeps, shallowing gently, over miles of fine sand, and where that sand first appears permanently raised, Suez has been built. The wide desolation of the desert surrounds it, a horizon of sand and stone meeting the reddish blue of the sky on three sides, whilst on the fourth the arm of the sea is visible, stretching far away to the south, one side of it bounded by the inhospitable rocks of the wilderness of Sinai, the other by the no less sterile shores of Africa.

Not a drop of fresh water is to be found in the vicinity of Suez; for miles the luckless traveller will find no trace of such, let him search never so diligently on every hand; all is sand, and stone, and sea-bleak sand, ugly stone, and a dangerous sea, a sea over which the Simoom of the desert wafts its blighting influence too often, filling every crevice of the exposed ship or steamer with clouds of fine sand, striking down in a fainting fit the strongest and the most muscular, and carrying

off to the wide bourne whence no traveller returns, the weaker or the more enervated.

Suez itself looks more like a city of the dead than of the living. Its flat-roofed oriental houses crumbling to decay, with here and there a sickly shrub forced into a kind of dying life by man's obstinacy and perseverance, are so indicative of desertion and misery, that one can scarcely fancy himself in a city or a town containing a living, breathing population, men, women, and children, such as constitute towns elsewhere. Casting the eye over the apparently illimitable desert that surrounds it, a train of camels, those toiling desertships,-is seen winding its way along in single file, most gloomy-looking, most melancholy.

There is something in the very aspect of the burdened camel that appears to tell of pain and suffering: the long, ungainly legs shambling about, the huge joints bending as if with springs; the rolling burden now thrown on one side, now on another, as the two legs on each side are simultaneously raised and then simultaneously depressed; the raised head and drooping neck, bent in, not proudly arched upwards like the horse's, all are cha

racteristics of patient endurance and long acquaintance with suffering, such as one pities and commiserates. Wending its way toilsomely and slowly over the desert, the nose of the one attached to the tail of the other, the train of camels makes its way along without a sound, almost without the appearance of life, a few men with long staves walking by the side, or else mounted uneasily on the burdens, dozing amid their merchandize.

The whole is a scene of truly oriental character, quite unlike what one is accustomed to in the West. One expects such a scene in the desert, and wonders it is so like what, from a child, he has pictured to himself; it is but the realization in actual life of what his imagination, guided by sketches and descriptions, has often bodied forth in the mind.

A vast number of camels were in waiting upon the beach, ready to receive the luggage and the mails, and to take them to Cairo. As we landed from our Arab boat, we saw them lying about on every side, chewing the cud peacefully, occasionally waving their long necks about from side to side in monotonous motion. The attendant Arabs were seated on

the sand in circles, some gambling, others discussing political matters-the last incursion of the Bedouins, the effect of the new Tanzimat, or the contrast between the rule of Mehemet Ali and Abbas Pacha in Egypt; others, again, repeating to each other alternate tales, tales similar to those of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and merrily did the long beards wag in laughter as they concluded.

Our caravanserai the Suez Hotel, as it was styled-was what might have been expected, a large and somewhat ruinous building, inclosing a square in the centre; the lower rooms mostly intended for cattle or merchandize, the upper as habitations. Round the square, on the inner side, ran a balcony or verandah, communicating with all the rooms, the favourite lounge of servants and gossips, who could hence descry what was going on in the court below, and the opening of any single apartment.

We had a breakfast at this nondescript establishment—a breakfast at which one might fancy some of the workmen from Babel were the parties appeasing their hunger. French, German, Spanish, and English were spoken at