Niebuhr found a number of Mohammedans at Alexandria who understood French, Swedish, and Danish as completely as if they had been born in the countries where those languages are spoken. As most European travellers proceed up the Nile from this city to Cairo, the members of the expedition were desirous of performing the journey by land, but were restrained by fear of the Arabs; and M. Forskaal, who afterward ventured upon this hardy enterprise, was actually stripped to the skin, and with great difficulty obtained back his breeches. Niebuhr now hired a small ship, and embarked on the 31st of October, but was detained in the Gulf of Aboukir by contrary winds. Impatient of delay, his companions proceeded thence to Rosetta by land, with a company of Turks; but our traveller continued his voyage, and reached the city very shortly after them. Though the inhabitants of Rosetta enjoyed the reputation of being peculiarly polite towards strangers, Niebuhr was too impatient to behold the capital of modern Egypt to linger long in any provincial city; he therefore hastened to ascend the Nile, and enjoyed the romantic prospect of fertility, villages peeping through groves of date-trees, and here and there vast wrecks of ancient cities, which all travellers in that extraordinary country have admired. They arrived at Cairo on the 10th of November. The Nile, like the Ganges, has long been renowned for the daring race of pirates who infest it. Bruce, and many other travellers, have celebrated their ingenuity; but the following anecdote, related by Niebuhr, exhibits their exquisite skill in a still more favourable point of view: A pasha, recently arrived in Egypt, happening to be encamped on the banks of the river, his servants, aware of the dexterity of their countrymen, kept so strict a watch during the night, that they detected one of the pirates, and brought him before the pasha, who threatened to put him to death on the spot. The prisoner, however, entreated permission to show the pasha one of the extraordinary tricks of his art, in the hope of thereby inducing him to spare his life. The permission was granted. The man then took up the pasha’s garments, and whatever else he found in the tent, and having tied them up into a packet, as the Egyptians do when they are about to swim across a river, made several turns before the company to amuse them. He then insensibly approached the Nile, and darting into the water like lightning, had already reached the opposite shore, with the pasha’s garments upon his head, before the Turks could get ready their muskets to fire at him.