It being about sundown when we entered the town, we made some inquiries for lodging. There are usually in the towns, and occasionally on the roads, houses built for the accommodation of travellers, called khans. They have rooms, but are entirely unfurnished, and the traveller is expected to provide for himself. They are beginning to keep, at some of them, the more necessary articles of food for man and beast, which the traveller may obtain at a reasonable price. Having, in some of my former tours, been greatly annoyed with _fleas_, and knowing these khans are the very _head-quarters_ of such gentry, we were rather on the watch, and made inquiry before alighting, whether they had any fleas in their establishment? They assured us that they had "a _plenty_! _plenty!_" We declined stopping, and passed on amidst the laugh of the bystanders. It began, however, to grow dark about the time we got out of the town, and after passing down the stream, among the gardens, for some time, and not finding a place that offered a good encampment, we were constrained to put up at a house on the road side, and sleep in a kind of open court. We found, to our discomfort, that we had not much mended the matter. We were most grievously beset with fleas, which were as greedy as if it was the first Frank blood they had tasted, and feared it might be the last. We found in the morning that we were in the immediate neighbourhood of a considerable body of the pasha's troops. Their parade-ground was over against us; arranged along one side I counted thirty-six cannon drawn up, and as we passed, we saw a considerable number of artillery-men, five or six in a company, manoeuvring, each under the direction of an individual. Several of these groups had a _little carriage_, not more than a foot long, a perfect toy, with a string to it, and were drawing it about and manoeuvring it in place of the cannon. It was laughable to see five or eight great awkward fellows pulling about a little toy, like a waggon, which a baby could have thrown about at pleasure. This is the Egyptian version of European tactics.