after gallery, until his torch began to burn low and the excitement of intoxication left him. With great difficulty he found his way back to the chapel where he had left his companions. They were gone. With still greater difficulty he reached the entrance to the catacomb. It was closed. He shouted frantically, and madly beat upon the railings with a piece of tombstone. But it was night and no one could hear. In desperation he started back for the chapel. He fell through a chasm upon crackling, crumbling bones. The shock to his nerves was terrible. Crawling out, he reached the chapel, amid intolerable fear. He who had many a time marched undauntedly on gleaming lines of bayonets and had schooled himself to look upon death without fear, was not equal to the trials of a night in a charnel house. His thirst became intolerable. He stumbled upon a bottle left by his companions and, supposing it contained water, drank eagerly of its contents. In a few moments the drink acted with violence and, in his delirium, he became the victim of wild visions. Spectres gathered around him. The bones of the dead rose and clattered before him. Fire gleamed in eyeless skulls. Fleshless lips chattered and shrieked till the caves echoed. Death must soon have been the result of this fearful experience had not morning come and brought fresh visitors to the catacombs, who discovered the young officer in a state of stupor and took him to the hospital. For months he lay prostrate with brain fever. He had been taught the weakness of man in that valley of the shadow of death, and ever after gave over his atheistic notions, and lived and died a christian. You may leave Alexandria by canal for the Nile, and then sail to Cairo. You will thus see the smaller canals, the villages, the peasantry, the dykes of the Nile, the mounds denoting ruins of ancient cities. You will see the wheels for raising water from the Nile by foot power, and will learn that the lands which are not subject to annual overflow must be irrigated by canals or by these wheels. You will see at the point where the Nile separates into its Damietta and Rosetta branches, the wonderful Barrage, or double bridge, intended to hold back the Nile waters for the supply of Lower Egypt without the need of water wheels. It is a mighty but faulty piece of engineering and does not answer its purpose. From this to Cairo the country gets more bluffy and, ere you enter the city, you may catch glimpses of the Pyramids off to the right. [Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE MAMELUKES.]