Unnoticed he traversed the picturesque streets that lay between the citadel and the gate that led by a straight road towards the castle and gardens of Ghizeh, passing the groups and features incident to Cairo: a lumbering train of British baggage waggons, escorted by our soldiers in clay-coloured khakee with bayonets fixed; an Egyptian officer in sky-blue uniform and red tarboosh 'tooling' along on a circus-like Arab; a whole regiment of darkies, perhaps with rattling drums and French bugles; strings of maimed, deformed, and blind beggars; private carriages with outriders in Turkish costumes of white muslin with gold embroideries, and bare-legged grooms; 'the gallant, gray donkeys of which Cairo is so proud, and which the Cairenes delight in naming after European celebrities, from Mrs. Langtry to Lord Wolseley;' singers of Nubian and Arabian songs and dealers in Syrian magic, all were left behind, and in the cool air of the morning Malcolm Skene found himself ambling on his camel under the shadows of the lebbek trees, with wading buffaloes and flocks of herons on either side of the road as he skirted the plain where the Pyramids stand--the Pyramids that mock Time, which mocks all things. He was too familiar with them then to bestow on them more than a passing glance, and rode forward on his somewhat lonely way. Hassan, his guide, like a true Arab, uttered a mocking yell on seeing the vast stony face of the Sphinx--an efrit--fired a pistol, and threw stones at it, as at a devil, and then civilization was left behind. Trusting to his guide Hassan, Skene was taken a few miles off his direct route southward down the left bank of the Nile, and while riding on, turning from time to time to converse with that personage, who was a typical Fellah--very dark-skinned, with good teeth, black and sparkling eyes, muscular of form, yet spare of habit, and clad simply in loose blue cotton drawers with a blue tunic and red tarboosh--it seemed that his face and voice were somehow not unfamiliar to him. But where, amid the thousands of low-class Fellaheen in Cairo, could Malcolm Skene have seen the former or heard the latter? Never before had he heard of Hassan Abdullah even by name. But 'strange it is, for how many days and weeks we may be haunted by a _likeness_ before we know what it is that is gladdening us with sweet recollections, or vexing us with some association we hoped to have left behind.'