At Aden, the most barren and gloomy place I have ever seen, we went out to the cantonments, which must have been built thousands of years ago. We hurried up the Red Sea to Suez, and then crossed over by land from Suez, eighty-four miles, to Cairo, with six hundred camels in the caravan. We had coaches carrying six passengers. I have a good idea of what the Sahara Desert is from having seen this desert between Suez and Cairo. Just before we reached Cairo, there was a cry from one of the coaches for us to look up at the sky. There were masts, minarets, and the whole city, in fact, painted on the sky. It was my first sight of the mirage I had heard so much about. We were then half-way from Suez to Cairo. I put up at Shepheard's Hotel, and immediately arranged to go out to the pyramids, ten miles from Cairo. Fifty donkey boys rivaled one another to get my custom. My donkey started off, and the first thing I knew he was rolling over me in the sand. He had stepped in a gopher-hole, and down he went. Travelers now go out in trolley-cars, eat ice-cream and drink champagne under the shade of the pyramids, and a splendid hotel stands alongside the Sphinx. In going up the pyramids it took three Arabs, two to push and one to pull, to get me to the top. When we got half-way up, an Arab wanted more bakshish. I talked to him pretty loud in something he didn't understand, and he consented to take me farther. The top of the pyramid of Ghizeh has been taken away, and the pyramid is now about fifteen feet square at the summit. I made up my mind, the moment I saw the pyramids, that these gigantic blocks were not stone, but had been produced by one of the lost arts in preparing concrete. It occurred to me, as the pyramids were hollow to the base, that they had been storehouses for grain, and were not built as tombs for the Rameses and Ptolemies. Humane kings had built them, I thought, in order to employ labor in time of dearth. As all travelers are told, it was said that a man would go down one pyramid and come up on another in so many minutes. I had seen such a number of "fakes" in my travels that, as I could not tell one Chinaman from another, how should I be able to tell one Arab from another? When this trick was done for me I thought it did not follow that the man on the other pyramid was the man who had been with me. I was surprised when I left Cairo to find a modern railway, that had been built by Said Pasha. We took the train for Alexandria. At Alexandria we took passage for the Holy Land. The Rev. J. R. MacFarlane, chaplain of Madras, wanted to see Jerusalem and landed at Joppa, or Jaffa, which has become famous for Napoleon's massacre.