A few minutes' walk will bring you to the foot of the oldest obelisk in the world, I believe: an obelisk compared with which Cleopatra's Needle is an infant in arms. Save for the marks of Napoleon's shot which it received during the Battle of the Mamelukes, its surface is practically unscratched. It is the dryness of the Egyptian climate, I reckon, that accounts for the staying powers of these old-timers. Most of them seem to have suffered more during Napoleon's short stay than they did during the flight of centuries. I guess his men were pretty rotten shots. I often wondered how they came to mess up the poor old Sphinx's nose, or what they were actually shooting at. It couldn't have been the old lady herself, for if they had they'd have missed her. Still, I shouldn't say too much against Napoleon and his men, for the bread we ate while at Zeitoun was nearly all baked in the ovens originally built by them. During our sojourn in camp we "did" the Pyramids of Gizeh, of course. It is a stiff climb to the top, especially if you are wearing riding breeches, but the view you get as a reward is really grand. The interior is also well worth a visit. You'll find the inside of this big sugar-loaf to be as hot as anything this side of Eternity, and you can't help wondering how you'd get out if the top fell in. By the way, most folks when they speak of the Pyramids seem to imagine there are only three in Egypt—those of Gizeh—yet there are several dozens of them, big, medium, and little, scattered about the country. At one place (Sakkarra) I counted either fourteen or sixteen, ranging from little piccaninnies to the oldest one in the world, the Step Pyramid. I also spent a most enjoyable day on the Nile, in a native boat—_feluccas_ I think they are called, or our own particular craft may have been a small _dhow_. We paid a visit to the palace of Pharaoh's daughter (the one that found Moses). The foundations and lower part of the original palace are still standing, the upper structure being more modern. The river washes the place on three sides, which, perhaps, accounts for it being fairly clean and fresh-smelling. Little _fellaheen_ villages, partly fishing and partly agricultural, lie scattered here and there along the river banks just as they lay in biblical days. We visited one of these hamlets (they are all much the same), and breathed the usual mixed aroma of camels, goats, sheep, fowls, stale fish, and stale native. I don't wonder that Moses went to sleep there.