'Through at the banker's, he recommended me to the Hotel ----, where I would find a good table, clean rooms, and none of my English compatriots. I love my native land and my countrymen _in it_, but as for them out of it, and as Bohemians--ugh! I am too much of a wolf myself to love wolves. Arrived at the hotel, with my head swimming with palm-trees, railroad, turbans, tarbooshes, veiled women, camels, pipes, dust, donkeys, oceans of blue calico, groaning water-wheels, the Nile, far-off view of the Pyramids, etc., I at once asked the headwaiter for a room, water, towels; he passed me into the hands of a very tall Berber answering to the name of Yusef, who was dressed in flowing garments and tarboosh, and who was one of the gentlest beings entitled to wear breeches I have ever seen; he had feet that in my recollection seem a yard long, and how he managed to move so noiselessly, unless both pedals were soft-shod, worries me to the present time. Well, at six o'clock the gong sounded for dinner, and out I went over marble floors to the dining hall, where I found only three other guests, who saluted me courteously when I entered, and at a signal from Yusef, a compromise between a bow and a salaam, we seated ourselves at table. Of the three guests, one was particularly a marked man, apart from his costume, that of a cavalry officer in the Pacha's service; there was something grand in his face, large blue eyes, full of humor and _bonhommie_, a prominent nose, a broad forehead, burned brown with the sun, his head covered with the omnipresent tarboosh, a mustache like Cartouche's; such was my _vis-à-vis_ at the hotel-table. 'In conversation with this officer, it turned up that one of my most intimate friends was his cousin, and so we had a bottle of old East-India pale sherry over that; then we had another to finally cement our acquaintance; I said finally--I should say, finally for dinner. 'I have seen the interiors of more than three hundred hotels in Europe, Africa, and America; but I have yet to see one that appeared so outrageously romantic as that of the Hotel ----, at Cairo, after that second bottle of sherry! The divans on which we reposed, the curious interlacing of the figures on the ceiling, the raised marble floor at the end of the room overlooking the street, the arabesques on the doors, and finally the never-ending masquerade-ball going on in the street under the divans where we sat and smoked.