ngs the
result is that though the road-bed is perfect the cars are as rough as
our freight cars. When the speed is over twenty-five miles an hour or
the road is crooked, the motion of the cars is well nigh intolerable.
Ordinarily the motion is so great that reading is difficult and writing
out of the question. At night the jar of the car is so severe that one
must be very tired or very phlegmatic to get any refreshing sleep. When
one travels all day and all night at a stretch--as in the journey from
Jeypore to Bombay--the fatigue is out of all proportion to the distance
covered. In fact Americans have been spoiled by the comforts of Pullman
sleeping-cars, in which foreign critics find so many flaws. Probably the
chief annoyance to our party of Americans, aside from the jar of the
cars, was the dust and soot which poured in day and night. The engines
burn soft coal and the dust on the road-beds is excessive. A system of
double windows and well-fitting screens would remove this nuisance, but
apparently the British in India think dust and grime necessary features
of railway travel, for no effort is made to eliminate them.

No Oriental trip would be complete without a visit to Egypt, and
especially a ride on the Nile. It is more difficult to make anyone
realize the charm of Egypt than of any other country of the Orient. The
people are dirty, ignorant, brutish: their faces contain no appeal
because they are the faces of Millet's "The Man With the Hoe." Centuries
of subjection have killed the pride which still lingers in the face and
bearing of the poorest Arab; the Egyptian peasant does not wear the
collar of Gurth, but he is a slave of the soil whose day of freedom is
afar off. Yet these degenerate people are seen against a background of
the most imposing ruins in the world. Luxor and Karnak and the tombs of
the kings near old Thebes contain enough remains of the splendor of
ancient Egyptian life to permit study for years. The mind is appalled by
this mass of temples, monuments, obelisks and colossal statues. It is
difficult to realize that the same people who are seen toiling in the
fields to-day raised these huge monuments to perpetuate the names of
their rulers. A climate as dry as that of the Colorado desert has
preserved these remains, so that in the rock tombs one may gaze upon
brightly painted hieroglyphs of the time of Moses that look as though
they were carved yesterday.

In this Oriental tour the stamp of strange