lightly contracted by the
drying up of the flesh and the muscles, seemed to have been shapely and
small, and the nails were gilded like those of the hand.

What was she, after all, this Nes Khons, daughter of Horus and Rouaa,
called Lady in her epitaph? Young or old, beautiful or ugly? It would be
difficult to say. She is now not much more than a skin covering bones,
and it is impossible to discover in the dry, sharp lines the graceful
contours of Egyptian women, such as we see them depicted in temples,
palaces, and tombs. But is it not a surprising thing, one that seems to
belong to the realm of dreams, to see on a table, in still appreciable
shape, a being which walked in the sunshine, which lived and loved five
hundred years before Moses, two thousand years before Jesus Christ? For
that is the age of the mummy which the caprice of fate drew from its
cartonnage in the midst of the Universal Exposition, amid all the
machinery of our modern civilisation.

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO CAIRO

The railway to Cairo runs first along a narrow strip of sand which
separates the Baheirehma'adieh, or Lake of Aboukir, from Lake Mareotis,
now filled with salt water. As you go towards Cairo, Lake Mareotis is on
your right and the Lake of Aboukir on your left. The former stretches
out like a sea between shores so low that they disappear, and thus make
it impossible to estimate the size of the lake, which melts away into
the sky on the horizon.

The sunlight fell perpendicularly upon its smooth waters, and made them
flash and sparkle until the eye was weary; in other places, the gray
waters lay stagnant amid the gray sands, or else were of the dead white
of tin. It would have been easy to believe one's self in the Holland
Polders, travelling along one of the sleepy inland seas. The heavens
were as colourless as Van der Velde's skies, and the travellers, who,
trusting to painters, had dreamed of a blaze of colour, gazed with
amazement upon the vast extent of absolutely flat, grayish toned land,
which in no wise recalled Egypt, at least such as one imagines it to be.
On the side opposite Lake Mareotis rose, in the midst of luxuriant
gardens, the country homes of the rich merchants of the city, of the
government officials and of the consuls, painted in bright colours,
sky-blue, rose or yellow, picked out with white, and here and there the
great sails of boats, bound to Foueh or to Rosetta through the
Mahmoudieh Canal, showed above the