Before taking the train to Cairo, we had to pass through the preliminaries of the Customs. Thanks to our guide, Mahmoud, we have obtained, by special favour, the permission for our boxes not to be opened. It took three hours to get from Alexandria to Cairo; every few minutes the train halted at a bustling station. At the stoppings the Arabs dusted our cars with long brooms made of ostrich feathers. The journey would have been perfect but for the heat and the dust; eyes, nose, mouth, were choked with it, and by the time we reached Cairo, our hair was quite grey. All through our desert journey I had felt as if I had wandered into a dream of the Old Testament. Egyptian villages, with huts of dry mud of the same colour as the soil, with a maze of dust, of children, of animals and flies, emerged here and there from between the date-palms laden with fruit hanging in big bunches. On the road we saw great brown buffaloes going wearily round and round, turning the irrigating mills. Strings of burdened camels marched slowly along the road. Here is a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his quick stepping horse, outriding a fat Fellah trotting on a small donkey with a woman sitting astride behind him, holding him round the waist. We now passed across the fertile delta of the Nile, through cotton plantations with their white flocks, and fields of ripening grain standing waist-high. In Egypt the land is so fertile that the harvest is got in three times a year. We are speeding along canals on which sailing-boats are gliding; bands of natives and buffaloes are bathing in them. Here is the Nile, which is very high at this season, all the land between the Biblical river and the sands being hidden beneath the waters. We are approaching the Metropolis of Africa. The windows of every compartment of our train are framed with eager, longing faces, straining for the first glimpse of the Pyramids. There they are, looking quite close in the clear atmosphere. The first view of these colossal piles rather disappointed me: they did not appear on the horizon as big as I thought they would be. We crossed the Nile by a long bridge and arrived at Cairo, halting in a vast domed station. Then we took a carriage and went to the New Hotel, situated in the Esbekieh district, the European quarter of Cairo. The season had not yet opened, and the hotel was comparatively empty, there being more servants than guests for the moment, but they were expecting a great number of visitors and great preparations were made: carpets were laid down, curtains were put up, and the sights and sounds of these preparations pursued us everywhere. Everything around seemed so strange to me. There were no chamber-maids in the hotel, and barefooted Nubians, wearing a flowing white cotton gown from neck straight to heel, served us.