I could find no room in the Wakalah Khan Khalil, the Long's, or Meurice's of native Cairo; I was therefore obliged to put up with the Jamaliyah, a Greek quarter, swarming with drunken Christians, and therefore about as fashionable as Oxford Street or Covent Garden. Even for this I had to wait a week. The pilgrims were flocking to Cairo, and to none other would the prudent hotel keepers open their doors, for the following sufficient reasons. When you enter a Wakalah, the first thing you have to do is to pay a small sum, varying from two to five shillings, for the Miftah (the key). This is generally equivalent to a month's rent; so the sooner you leave the house the better for it. I was obliged to call myself a Turkish pilgrim in order to get possession of two most comfortless rooms, which I afterwards learned were celebrated for making travellers ill; and I had to pay eighteen piastres for the key and eighteen ditto per mensem for [p.43]rent, besides five piastres to the man who swept and washed the place. So that for this month my house-hire amounted to nearly four pence a day. But I was fortunate enough in choosing the Jamaliyah Wakalah, for I found a friend there. On board the steamer a fellow-voyager, seeing me sitting alone and therefore as he conceived in discomfort, placed himself by my side and opened a hot fire of kind inquiries. He was a man about forty-five, of middle size, with a large round head closely shaven, a bull-neck, limbs sturdy as a Saxon's, a thin red beard, and handsome features beaming with benevolence. A curious dry humour he had, delighting in "quizzing," but in so quiet, solemn, and quaint a way that before you knew him you could scarcely divine his drift. "Thank Allah, we carry a doctor!" said my friend more than once, with apparent fervour of gratitude, after he had discovered my profession. I was fairly taken in by the pious ejaculation, and some days elapsed before the drift of his remark became apparent. "You doctors," he explained, when we were more intimate, "what do you do? A man goes to you for ophthalmia: it is a purge, a blister, and a drop in the eye! Is it for fever? well! a purge and kinakina (quinine). For dysentery? a purge and extract of opium. Wa'llahi! I am as good a physician as the best of you," he would add with a broad grin, "if I only knew the Dirham-birhams,[FN#1]-drams and drachms,-and a few break-jaw Arabic names of diseases." Haji Wali[FN#2] therefore emphatically advised me to [p.44]make bread by honestly teaching languages. "We are doctor-ridden," said he, and I found it was the case.