The stretcher bearers, two stalwart Australians, took me to the elevator, across the deck, and out onto the pier. It was now getting toward evening. A lady stopped the stretcher between the pier and the ambulance, and handed one of the bearers a little white packet containing a towel, soap, tooth-brush and tooth-powder. Without waiting to be thanked she went on to intercept another stretcher. The stretcher bearer put the package under my pillow. "Ready, Bill," said one of the bearers with the nasal twang of the Bushman. "Lift away," said Bill, and they lifted the stretcher up on the top tier of the ambulance wagon, without stepping up from the ground. They did it with the same motion as when two men swing a bag of grain. But it was not in the least uncomfortable for me. These Australian stretcher bearers who meet the incoming hospital ships are amazingly strong. There is an easy gracefulness in the way they swing along with a stretcher that makes you trust them. I was the last man to go in that ambulance wagon, and in a few minutes we were whirling smoothly along good roads amid the familiar smells of Egyptian bazaars. This ambulance drive was a good deal different from the one on the Peninsula just after I had been wounded. After about half an hour the ambulance swerved off the smooth asphalt road onto a gravel road, slowed down, and ran into a yard. The Australians reappeared, opened the flaps, and began unloading. We were in the square of a large hospital. All around us were buildings. A fine-looking, bronzed man, with the uniform of a colonel, was directing some Sikhs who were carrying the stretchers from the ambulances into the different buildings. All the stretchers were lying on the ground in a long row. As soon as each one was inspected by the colonel, he told the stretcher bearers where to take it. When he came to mine, he said, "Dangerously wounded, Ward three." Then, to the stretcher bearers, "Careful, very careful."