Your interesting account of the visit of Alexander the Great (331 B.C.) to the Oracle, when, marching along the coast to Matruh, he turned south and underwent great hardships before reaching his destination, recalls a very different journey I made to Sollum in 1917. Leaving Alexandria by train for Behig, I there found a fleet of armoured motorcars awaiting me, and the journey to and from Sollum, then garrisoned by British troops, was comfortably accomplished in four days. To my great regret I was too pressed for time to be able to visit Siwa, where, “on all hands springs of water gushed forth . . . that human ants’ nest, fabricated for the most part of rock-salt, mud and palm trunks . . . to which the Great War surging round the world had brought the drone of aeroplanes, the hum of armoured cars and rattle of machine guns.” Your reference in Chapter V to the wonderful work carried on by Miss Nina Baird amongst the bedouin women and children rendered destitute in consequence of the Senussi invasion, recalls several visits Lady Wingate and I made to Amria—the village in the desert west of Alexandria and not far from Lake Mariut, where, as you say, this courageous lady worked practically singlehanded in teaching these desert waifs and strays to make carpets—thus starting an industry and giving the women and children a means of livelihood and a form of protection which for ever will be remembered with gratitude by the Western Arabs. A daughter of that well-known and greatly respected Scotsman, Sir Alexander Baird, an excellent horsewoman, a good Arabic scholar, and one who performed important services in the Egyptian troubles in the spring of 1919, Miss Baird’s energetic efforts throughout the war utterly exhausted her strength, and she fell an easy victim to typhoid soon after—to be followed a few months later by her talented father, and thus was the British community in Egypt deprived of two valuable lives who had endeared themselves to Europeans and natives alike and whose loss is deplored by all. On my last visit the carpet-making industry was about to be removed from Amria to an imposing structure built by Captain Jennings Bramley at Behig, the headquarters of the Eastern District of the Western Desert. Here this energetic official had also constructed, out of the ruins of an old building, a mediæval-looking stronghold, where we spent a few days and visited the ruined church of St. Menas, to which you make a passing reference in Chapter I. This buried Christian city is locally known as Abu Menas, and for long defied discovery, as it had not occurred to those in search of it to connect it with the Arab name of Abumna, until the German explorer, Kauffmann, and his companion lighted on the historic spot, which lies from fifty to fifty-five miles south-west of Alexandria. Your readers may be interested to know that Menas was an Egyptian in the Roman army who became a Christian and took the opportunity of a great public