Landed at Cairo, the traveller of the present day will find a steamer once a fortnight ready to take him up to the first cataract and back again, as fast as Young Rapid, or any other son of a tailor, could desire. But even the rational tourist will be tempted to send on his Kandjiah, (the old-fashioned Nile boat,) well found and provisioned, a fortnight or three weeks before him, and overtake her in the steamer. The Kandjiah voyage up stream is often wearisome, downward never--as in the descent you are borne softly along at from three to six miles an hour, even when you sleep. From the first cataract to the second is only about two hundred miles, and occupies about three weeks; but to those who can find pleasure in what is most wild and dreamy and unearthly in scenery and art, the desert view from Mount Abousir, the temples of Guerf, Hassan, and Ipsamboul, are worth all the rest of the Nile voyage, except Thebes and exquisite Philæ.[11] Returned to Alexandria, as we will suppose, in March, the traveller will be quite early enough for Syria, whose winter (considering the tented life he is compelled to lead) is not to be despised. A steamer transports him to Beyrout in thirty hours; and there our true travel begins.[12] [11] The mere physical pleasure of the upper voyage has been thus described--"No words can convey an idea of the beauty and delightfulness of tropical weather, at least while any breeze from the north is blowing. There is a pleasure in the very act of breathing--a voluptuous consciousness that existence is a blessed thing: the pulse beats high, but calmly; the eye feels expanded; the chest heaves pleasureably, as if air was a delicious draught to thirsty lungs; and the mind takes its colouring and character from sensation. No thought of melancholy ever darkens over us--no painful sense of isolation or of loneliness, as day after day we pass on through silent deserts, upon the silent and solemn river. One seems, as it were, removed into another state of existence; and all the strifes and struggles of that from which we have emerged seem to fade, softened into indistinctness. This is what Homer and Alfred Tennyson knew that the lotus-eaters felt when they tasted of the mysterious tree of this country, and became weary of their wanderings:-- '----To him the gushing of the wave Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores: and, if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave! And deep asleep he seemed, yet all awake, And music in his ears his beating heart did make.'