We were hurried back to Serapoeum for the move. This had been pending any time the last two months: the Turkish feints beyond railhead had delayed it. But it had come now. We were in the desert a bare thirty-six hours. We entrained in the scorching afternoon. The _khamseen_ was whispering potentially, but not menacingly. We moved out in the cool of the afternoon. Nefisha was passed, with its hordes of bints and wales hawking chocolate, fruits, and fizzy drinks--and hawking successfully ... on through Ismailia cooling off under her fir-groves beside the delicious lake ... up through Mahsamah, where the flights to the Canal had made their first footsore halt ... on and on, taking our last look on the soft evening desert, and keeping the placid sweet-water Canal. We felt we were seeing it all for the last time. And we hoped we were, though now it looked inviting enough. But it was not the desert normal, and well we knew it; we had seen too often this seductive evening gentleness turn to relentless blistering heat in the morning.... On through Kassassin, always--since reading the Tel-el-Kebir epitaphs--the scene of that "midnight charge" ... up to Tel-el-Kebir itself, its miles of tents darkening beside the hanging dhow-sails ... through Zagazig in the late dusk, with its close-packed houses and its semi-nudes in the upper stories ... and so on into the night, with snatches of sleep, until we were wakened at 2 a.m. by the sudden stop and the bustle at the Alexandrian quays.... The three hours' embarking of men and baggage, and so to bunk, and white sheets and yielding mattress and the feeling of a _room_ about one--and to sleep. There were a few hours' leave next day, when we took a last affectionate perambulation about the well-loved, well-bred city. And as we breakfasted next morning we were moving out of the inner harbour. By ten we could look back at the brown towers, and see the place as a whole from the low strip of Mex, away to the eastern sand-dunes at Ramleh. Alexandria had been good to us, and it was hard to leave her, whatever the exaltation of anticipating the new field. Egypt as a whole, despite its stinks, its filth, its crude lasciviousness, its desert sand and flies, heat and fiery, dusty blasts, had charmed and amazed and compensated in a thousand ways. It was our introduction to foreign-ness, and, as such, had made an arresting impression that could never be deleted. France may cause us less discomfort, and may hold a glamour and a brilliance of which Egypt knows nothing; but the impression left by France can hardly be more vivid than that of Egypt, our first-love in the world at large. BOOK IV FRANCE SECTION A.--A BASE CHAPTER I ENTRÉE