It is a touching and picturesque procession--much more picturesque than ours and much more numerous; notwithstanding that our united forces, including donkey boys, porters and miscellaneous hangers-on, number nearer thirty than twenty persons. For there are the M. B.’s and their nephew, and L---- and the writer, and L----’s maid, and Talhamy, all on donkeys; and then there are the owners of the donkeys, also on donkeys; and then every donkey has a boy; and every boy has a donkey; and every donkey-boy’s donkey has an inferior boy in attendance. Our style of dress, too, however convenient, is not exactly in harmony with the surrounding scenery; and one cannot but feel, as these draped and dusty pilgrims pass us on the road, that we cut a sorry figure with our hideous palm-leaf hats, green veils, and white umbrellas. But the most amazing and incongruous personage in our whole procession is unquestionably George. Now George is an English north-country groom whom the M. B.’s have brought out from the wilds of Lancashire, partly because he is a good shot and may be useful to “Master Alfred” after birds and crocodiles, and partly from a well-founded belief in his general abilities. And George, who is a fellow of infinite jest and infinite resource, takes to eastern life as a duckling to the water. He picks up Arabic as if it were his mother tongue. He skins birds like a practiced taxidermist. He can even wash and iron on occasion. He is, in short, groom, footman, house-maid, laundry-maid, stroke-oar, gamekeeper and general factotum all in one. And, besides all this, he is gifted with a comic gravity of countenance that no surprises and no disasters can upset for a moment. To see this worthy anachronism cantering along in his groom’s coat and gaiters, livery-buttons, spotted neckcloth, tall hat, and all the rest of it; his long legs dangling within an inch of the ground on either side of the most diminutive of donkeys; his double-barreled fowling-piece under his arm, and that imperturbable look in his face, one would have sworn that he and Egypt were friends of old, and that he had been brought up on pyramids from his earliest childhood. It is a long and shelterless ride from the palms to the desert; but we come to the end of it at last, mounting just such another sand-slope as that which leads up from the Ghîzeh road to the foot of the great pyramid. The edge of the plateau here rises abruptly from the plain in one long range of low perpendicular cliffs pierced with dark mouths of rock-cut sepulchers, while the sand-slope by which we are climbing pours down through a breach in the rock, as an Alpine snow-drift flows through a mountain gap from the ice-level above.