“It didn’t happen. It was one of the most crafty and cold-blooded butcheries known in history. You know the name Mameluke signifies White Slave. The founders of the Mamelukes were originally Circassians, who had been brought into slavery in this country. They gradually became favorites, but finally turned to tyrants. They had helped Mehemet Ali to secure his position of power, but he feared and distrusted them. He finally decided it was expedient to get rid of them. So he invited them to a great banquet, to be held in the citadel. They came without suspecting his bloody and treacherous purpose. There were nearly five hundred of them, magnificently dressed and mounted. When the great gate had closed behind them, and they could not retreat, the viceroy’s troops appeared on the walls and poured a withering fire on the entrapped Mamelukes. They were mowed down, men and horses, in a most horrible manner. Of all the Mamelukes only one escaped. He forced his horse to mount the heaped-up bodies of his bleeding comrades and their dying horses, and leaped the parapet, followed by a volley of bullets. In some manner he escaped untouched, although his horse fell beneath him. He fled into the desert.” Nadia gazed at the grim walls of the citadel and shuddered. “It seems that every historic spot is stained with crime,” she said. They soon reached the top of the hill and found they were just in time to witness the glories of an Egyptian sunset. The view from that elevation was most impressive. Below them, and near at hand, rose a great mass of delicate and graceful minarets, glittering in the last rays of the sun. The strange Oriental city huddled beyond, and then, as far as the eye could reach, wound the silver Nile, its shores on either side green with verdure. Away to the west the sun was sinking into a violet sea of light. There lay the mighty desert, brown, barren, desolate—the desert with its dreaded sand storms and simooms. On the edge of this desert they could see three mighty shapes, silhouetted against the sky—the Pyramids. They knew that for at least five thousand years those mysterious and marvelous monuments had been standing thus, casting their lengthening shadows across the eastern waste, as the sun sank to its nightly rest in the bosom of the desert. Silence fell on them. They watched the sun go down, and it seemed that the orb of day had sunk in hopeless despair to rise no more. They were impressed by the mightiness of the universe, and they felt themselves mere ants amid the marvels of creation. It was a place and time to give them a just understanding of their own insignificance. CHAPTER XXVI—SOME INTERESTING CONVERSATION The sun was gone, blue shadows gathered, and night came stalking up from Syria and Arabia beyond the isthmus. So absorbed had our friends been by the splendid spectacle, that they had failed to give heed to their immediate surroundings.