ere were many people, including
women, in Western dress, but there were also many women in cloaks, and
men in the traditional Arab _bornoss_, the enveloping robe called a
burnoose in English. For the first time, the boys saw several men in
blue gowns, and Rick asked Hassan what they were.

"_Fellahin_," Hassan replied. "How you say? Farmers. From country. Man
tell me that is where your word 'fella' come from."

Rick looked with new interest. He had heard of the _fellahin_, the
farmer-peasants of Egypt. Many of them lived and worked as their
ancestors had centuries ago, plowing with wooden plows, living in
mud-and-wattle houses. They represented the past of Egypt, as
installations like the atomic energy plant at En-Shass, or Inchass as it
was sometimes called, represented the future.

There were soldiers along the route, too, dressed in British-style brown
uniforms. Some carried Sten guns, vicious little submachine guns
originally of English manufacture.

"Why the soldiers?" Scotty asked.

"Camp near," Hassan replied.

And then, abruptly, the boys lost interest in people, because looming
ahead, like something from a travel movie, was a pyramid!

Hassan rounded a corner and another pyramid came into view. They were
enormous, Rick thought. He hadn't expected anything so huge. "Are we at
Giza already?" he asked.

"This Giza," Hassan agreed. He pronounced it more like _Gize'h_.

"I always thought the pyramids were out in the desert," Scotty objected.

"Is true," Hassan said. "You will see."

They did, within minutes. The terrain changed from the green, fertile,
Nile Valley to the bleak Sahara as though cut by a giant knife. For the
first time, Rick understood the phrase "Egypt, gift of the Nile." Where
the yearly Nile overflow brought fertile silt and moisture, there was
lush green land. Where the overflow stopped, the desert began. No
intermediate ground lay between. Egypt consisted of the Nile Valley and
the desert, with nothing in between.

The road crossed the dividing line and they were in the Sahara Desert.
Hassan drove between houses of faded red clay and tan stucco, unlike the
modern apartments a few hundred yards back. It was as though they had
driven into a different country. Children, goats, chickens, and Arab
adults scattered before the car. It was a typical desert-country scene,
and right at the edge of modern Cairo!

Hassan turned a sharp corner and Giza lay before them, up a gradual,
rising slo