It was no wonder that Miss Nightingale pitied the poor people; for the Egypt in which she travelled was as Mehemet Ali, the Lion of the Levant, had left it. She saw girls sold in the open slave market "at from £2 to £9 a head." She heard how justice was sold to the highest bidder; and "everybody," she noted, "seems to bastinado everybody else." "Every man," she noted further, "is a conscript for the army, and mothers put out their children's right eye to save them from conscription, till Mehemet Ali, who was too clever for them, had a one-eyed regiment, who carried the musket on the left shoulder." Miss Nightingale was fond of escaping from the dahabiah in order to wander about the desert, "poking my own nose," as she wrote home, "into all the villages," and seeing for herself how "these poor people" lived. "They call me 'the wild ass of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,' because I am so fond of getting away." Egyptian impressions stayed long in her memory, and they recurred to her thirty years later in connection with her Indian studies.[45] As on her earlier visit to Rome, so now in Egypt she utilized all such opportunities as came in her way for studying the work of religious Sisterhoods. At Alexandria she passed her days, she wrote, "much to my satisfaction, as I had travelled with two Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul from Paris to Auxerre, who gave me an introduction to the Sisters here; and I have spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and _Miséricorde_. There are only 19 of them, but they seem to do the work of 90." [45] _E.g._ in an article in _Good Words_, August 1879: "Whoever in the glorious light of an Egyptian sunset--where all glows with colour, not like that of birds and flowers, but like transparent emeralds and sapphires and rubies and amethysts, the gold and jewels and precious stones of the Revelations--has seen the herds wending their way home on the plain of Thebes by the colossal pair of sitting statues, followed by the stately woman in her one draped garment, plying her distaff, a naked, lovely little brown child riding on her shoulder, and another on a buffalo, can conjure up something of the ideal of the ryot's family life in India." II