donkeys on all sides, and, streaking in among them, tall camels; then seven more miles of trees and a good causeway to the pyramids. Since then I have gone over the road many times, and I am of the opinion that the Nile’s valley would make an ideal “happy hunting-ground,” to which all good tourists might go when cruel waves have ceased to toss them and their hotel lives are over. All too soon you must go hack to Cairo, where the Bedouin ceases to be the proud son of the desert and becomes a peddler, where sheep become mutton and clover is only fodder. But Cairo is about what the tourist expects of it and what the hotel proprietor thinks you want. He fills the halls of his hotel with gaily painted columns, and on each side of the staircase are gaudy figures; and for those tourists who take their Egypt between the slipper bazaar and the fish-market it may do. [Illustration: At Lady Grenfell’s Masquerade Ball--on the eve of Kitchener’s departure for the Soudan.] The Gizeh side of the river is more restful, with its ferry to Bulak, its gardens, and its khedival sporting club, which is Egypt as England would have it--polo twice a week, croquet and rackets, a grand stand, and a steeplechase course; and the same men who play polo spend their mornings on the desert, teaching their troops to form hollow squares against the day they will have to meet the dervishes. You should choose your own Cairo. If you leave it to a dragoman you will get mostly howling dervishes and mosques; and if you leave it to a donkey-boy, there is no telling where he will take you--most likely to the fish-market. But with a guide-book and a bicycle you will miss very little that lies between the citadel and the pyramids. Cairo is not all hotel life, and bazaars lining narrow streets like open fireplaces, filled with putty-faced Turks as watchful as the brown buzzards that fly overhead; there are streets [Illustration: A Descendant of the Prophet--El Saied Ahmad Abdel Khalek Affandi, Sheik el Sadat.] that are difficult to find, leading to forgotten courtyards with great trees standing in the middle of them, latticed windows bulging out over uneven pavements below, where black and gray crows waddle about. In such a [Illustration: A Bargain in the Ghezireh Gardens.] [Illustration: A Dancing-Girl.]