The dahabeeah journey will usually cost $1500 for two persons to the first cataract and back, and $2000 for four persons; about $500 should be added in each case for the second cataract. For these figures you can get a large, well-fitted boat, and will be entitled to live with every possible comfort. Smaller and plainer boats may be had for less money, and the food supplied by the dragoman will be correspondingly less luxurious. Prices vary according to the season, and the number of travellers desiring to make the journey, and it sometimes happens that a good boat may be had for less than the figures named above. The dahabeeah journey can be made by time or by the course; either way is not altogether satisfactory, and a traveller who has made it by one method generally advises his friends to try the other. If you go by time, the dragoman manages to delay you as much as he can, and will invent unheard-of excuses for stopping the boat; if you go by the course, he hurries you along altogether too rapidly, and you often find that you have sailed by a place you specially desired to visit. All things considered, the best plan is to charter the boat by the course, with a stipulation for a certain number of days for stoppages at the interesting points. From fourteen to twenty days are the ordinary stipulations for stoppages, and the whole journey can be made from Cairo to the first cataract and back in about fifty days. [For forms of contract see Murray's "Hand-book for Egypt."] A dahabeeah journey would have made our friends too late for their contemplated trip to Palestine and Syria, and so they decided to go by steamboat. They left Boulak one pleasant afternoon a few minutes past three o'clock, and steamed slowly up the river. The boys sat beneath the awning that covered the deck and watched the gray walls of Cairo, the palaces and hovels, the gardens of the island of Rhoda, and the green fields that stretched out from the western bank till they met the glistening sands of the desert near the platform where the Pyramids of Gizeh rise toward the sky. On the other side of the river the Mokattam hills bounded the horizon, and marked the beginning of the Libyan Desert; the tufted palm-trees waved here and there, sometimes in clusters or groups, and at others standing solitary in the surrounding waste. On the land there were trains of stately camels, and on the water the boats of the natives ploughed slowly along, many of them laden till their gunwales were dangerously near the water. As the boat steamed onward, the Citadel of Cairo, with the slender minarets of the Mosque of Mohammed Ali, faded away in the distance, the broad valley became more and more enclosed, the hills seemed to shut in upon the river, and when the sun went down the great pyramids were little more than specks on the horizon, and just visible through the palm-trees.