"To return to Alexandria. The town has nothing of antiquity about it beyond its name. Picture to yourself ruins inhabited by an impassive people, who take everything as it comes, whom nothing astonishes; who, pipe in mouth, squat on their haunches all day long before their doors on a bench, taking very little notice of their families or children; the mothers wander about, their faces covered with black rags, offering their children for sale to the passers-by; the men, half naked, with bodies the colour of bronze, and loathsome skins, stirring up the muddy streams, devouring and grubbing up all they find, like pigs; houses hardly twenty feet high, with flat roofs, the insides like stables, the outsides just four bare walls. Such are the houses of Alexandria! "Then remember that around this sink of squalor and misery are the foundations of the most celebrated city of ancient times, and the most precious monuments of art. "When we left this town to ascend the Nile we found a desert as bare as your hand, where, every five or ten leagues, we came upon a wretched well of brackish water. Imagine an army compelled to cross those arid plains, which do not afford the soldier the faintest fleck of shade against the intolerable heat. Dressed in woollen, carrying his five days' rations and his knapsack, a soldier is so overcome by the heat and the weight of the things he is carrying that at the end of an hour's march he lightens his burden by throwing away his rations, thinking only of his present sufferings, and regardless of the morrow's hunger. "He is parched with thirst, and there is no water to drink. Then, to add to the horror of the picture, the men begin to die of thirst, of exhaustion and of heat; others, seeing their comrades' sufferings, blow their own brains out; others, again, throw themselves with all their arms and baggage into the Nile, and perish in its waters. "Each day our march saw the same sights, with even more unbelievable and unheard-of hardships still! The whole army went without bread for seventeen days. The soldiers lived on pumpkins and _prooils_ and what vegetables they could pick up by the way. And that was all the food either general or common soldier had. The generals often fasted for eighteen, twenty, or twenty-four hours, as the soldiers, being the first to reach a village, would pillage everywhere, and the officers had often to satisfy themselves with what the soldiers had refused, or with their wasteful leavings. "It is useless to tell you of our drinks, as here we have to live under Mahomedan law, which forbids wine, but gives us abundance of Nile water as a substitute.[2]