To the far east we had a gladdening glimpse of the desert, the wild waterless wilderness of Sur on the Asiatic side, which looks like snow under the moonlight. I have not enjoyed myself so much with Nature for four and a half years as now, once more smelling the desert air and the usual Eastern scenes. The Nizam (regular soldiers), negroes, Bedawi draped in usual cloak and _kuffíyeh_, and women in blue garments, not changed a hair since the days of Abraham, except that they now carry matchlocks instead of spears; the tawny camels squat upon the ground; the black sheep and goats huddle in knots, vainly attempting to shade their heads from the sun; the seedy _dahabíyyeh_ rolls past, and is hustled aside by the fussy high-pressure _mouche_, which carries the mails daily to Ismailiyyah, a pretty mushroom town with palaces, Consulates and gardens, with telegraph and railway. It contained then two thousand souls, and hoisted nine various national flags. The land of Goshen is immediately north-west. There are plenty of foxes on the Asiatic side, and one sat like a dog on the sandbank and stared at us. We passed the village called Serapeum, which communicates with a Bedawi village in Asia. To the south and westward rise the sandy cliffs of Jebel Jeneffeh, and towering above all, Jebel Atakeh. As we got near Suez, the children run along, crying, "Bakshish!" The soldiers threw them a bit of bread, but as we threw them nothing the petition changed to the curses with which the Orientals are so familiar, "Na'al Abukum ya Kilab!" ("Drat your fathers, O ye dogs!") At Suez, if you leave your ship--and it is only going to anchor for a few hours in the bay, an hour's steam from the town, and much more by sail--there is a great danger, if a contrary wind springs up, that you are not able to join it. From being a town of importance, Suez was ruined by the opening of the Canal. She has become a big village of three thousand natives, and about seventy-five Europeans, employed in telegraph, post-office, steamers, and railways. She sits solitary under the sky in the sand on the borders of the sea, far from all civilization or progress. She has had a past, and Richard says she _will have a future_. The troops were then collecting at Masáwwah; three thousand camels were being shipped. One would think that this regular wall of Asiatic mountain, now painted pink and plum blue by the last flood of sunlight, which begins far north of the Lebanon, and which extends southwards to Aden, a counterpart of the Moab range, would have served Holman Hunt for a background to his famous "Scape-goat." Richard knew all this ground twenty-five years before, and he showed me where the Israelites are supposed to have crossed the Red Sea, and where they did cross. Christians have three places, and the Arabs two.