Frequent villages animate the river's edge; they are built of unbaked bricks coated with mud, and have a most striking effect. The simplicity and variety of the shapes of the houses, with their slightly sloping sides and flat roofs, give them a certain dignity in their picturesqueness which delights me; the colour, too, is particularly agreeable, and is the most beautiful foil to the bronze-brown of the naked, or nearly naked, fellaheen and the indigo of the robes of their wives; to the sparkling white of the doves that swarm in the gardens, and to the cinder-colour of the buffaloes that wink and snooze along the bank. Every village nestles in a dense grove of date-palms, and one cannot conceive a lovelier harmony than that which is made by the combination of the browns below with the sea-green of the sweeping branches and the flame-like orange of the fruit. The acacia (here a large, massive tree, with a vigorous dark green foliage) is frequent in the villages. The shape of the hills and mountains is very peculiar and striking. It gives the idea of a choppy sea of sand thrown up into abrupt peaks and then uniformly truncated by a sweep of a vast scythe, sweeping everything from horizon to horizon. Here and there a little peak, too low to be embraced in the general decapitation, raises its head amongst innumerable table-lands and gives great value and relief to the general outline. Meanwhile an occasional train and not infrequent lines of telegraph poles don't add to the poetry of the scene. Nor the flies to one's comfort! What a curse they are! they _infest_ one's face. I wonder what the epiderm of Egyptian children is made of; you see babies with a dozen flies settled, no, stuck, embedded in and round each of their eyes, and as many in and about their noses and mouths; and they make no attempt to remove them--seem absolutely unconscious of them. Scenery this afternoon less interesting--river wider--banks more monotonous. Opposite a place called Magaga, some fine mountains on the east bank, scored with innumerable horizontal lines marking the monotonous parallel strata of which they are composed; a characteristic peculiarity in all the Egyptian hills I have seen as yet. (The finest in outline are the Quarries opposite Sakkara, on the right bank, and like those behind the Citadel at Cairo.)