In Egypt one feels very safe. Smiling policemen in clothes of spotless white--emblematic, surely, of their innocence!--seem to be everywhere, standing calmly in the sun. Very gentle, very tender, although perhaps not very true, are the Bedouin at the Pyramids. Up the Nile the fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen, [Illustration: From a photograph by Bonfils of Beirut VILLAGE ON THE SITE OF ANCIENT MEMPHIS] smile protectingly upon you, as if they would say, “Allah has placed us here to take care of the confiding stranger.” No ferocious demands for money fall upon my ears; only an occasional suggestion is subtly conveyed to me that even the poor must live and that I am immensely rich. An amiable, an almost enticing seductiveness seems emanating from the fertile soil, shining in the golden air, gleaming softly in the amber sands, dimpling in the brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of the Nile. It steals upon one. It ripples over one. It laps one as if with warm and scented waves. A sort of lustrous languor overtakes one. In physical well-being one sinks down, and with wide eyes one gazes and listens and enjoys, and thinks not of the morrow. The dahabiyeh--her very name, the _Loulia_, has a gentle, seductive, cooing sound--drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled. Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop, and straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the live-long day with the sakieh. And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the lifted water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains of Algeria. And always the sun is shining, and the body is drinking in its warmth, and the soul is drinking in its gold. And always the ears are full of warm and drowsy and monotonous music. And always the eyes see the lines of brown bodies, on the brown river-banks above the brown waters, bending, straightening, bending, straightening, with an exquisitely precise monotony. And always the _Loulia_ seems to be drifting, so quietly she slips up, or down, the level waterway.