He never does either of these things the same way twice. Sometimes he breaks one leg in two or three places where it had never broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly direction, and then suddenly changes his course and lurches up from the rear, and you grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking rapidly to one side, and rising, with a jump equal to that of a horse taking a fence, in the front. He can disjoint himself in more different places, than explorers have found sources for the river Nile, and there is no keener pleasure than that which he affords you in watching the countenance of a friend who is being elevated on his back for the first time. He and the palm-tree can make any landscape striking, and he and the sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo. The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a carriage and warns common people out of the way, and who beats them with a stick if they do not hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days when the traffic in all of the streets was so congested that he was an absolute necessity; now he makes it possible for a carriage to move forward at a trot, which without his aid it could not do. It is obvious that to do this he must run swiftly. Most men when they run bend their bodies forward and keep their mouths closed in order to save their wind. The sais runs with his shoulders thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged elephant. He holds his long wand at his side like a musket, and not trailing in his hand like a walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white stuff, and a sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. His breeches are white, and as voluminous as a woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above his knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and rigid with muscle. On his head he has a fez with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk scarf of many colors is bound tightly around his waist. He is a perfect ideal of color and movement, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or roars as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time in a menagerie. It is not a human cry at all, and you never hear it, even to the last day of your stay in Cairo, without a start, as though it were a cry of "help!" at night, or the quick-clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other people may have one. They appealed to me as much more autocratic appendages than a troop of lifeguards. The rastaquouere who first