t, however, be eaten without
shameless messiness, as they are so difficult to peel.

When the afternoon sun grows scorchingly hot the grinning attendant
proves himself for once useful, by showing us that we can pull up
sun-shutters with wooden slats outside the glass ones. He has indeed
been anxious to pull them up all round the compartment ever since we
started, and nothing but physical force has restrained him, for he
cannot conceive how anyone could want to look out. Even now we keep down
those on the sunless side, which grieves him deeply.

So all the afternoon we watch the glorious scenes changing in sunlight;
we see the sailing boats, with their tapering white wings, laden with
cargoes of straw, drifting up the canal, driven by the strong north
wind; we pass innumerable villages, and some larger towns, where
market-day has attracted vast crowds.

The small villages are indeed wonderful, and the first one excited us
all three so much that we had to hurry to the window. Imagine a colony
of last year's swallows' nests under the eaves, or a collection of
ruined pigsties and sheds, only they are not ruins at all, but living,
thriving villages with healthy people in them. The houses are all made
of mud; a few are fashioned out of mud bricks, but many are merely of
mud stuck and moulded together as a child would form a mud house with
his hands. The doors and the holes for windows are crooked and lop-sided
as they would be in a childish attempt. The roof is covered over with an
untidy thatch of straw, thrown on anyhow, with piles of cotton scrub on
the top of it. This scrub is for firing, and it is kept up there in the
Egyptian's only storehouse; it is backed up by cakes of dried buffalo
dung used for the same purpose. As it never rains the fuel is quite safe
from damp.

Every man builds his own house as it pleases him, without regard to the
style or position of his neighbour's, consequently the streets are
narrow crooked passages of uneven levels; there is not a green thing in
them, and the people live in dust and eat it and wallow in it. Here and
there you can see a tray of flat cakes pushed out into the midst of the
dust to bake in the sun and form a playground for the flies and the
microbes, for the Egyptian has no respect for microbes, he is
germ-proof; for generations he and his forefathers have drunk the Nile
water, unfiltered and carried in goat-skins not too well cured. Yet the
people are happy and the childr