w of her home. To both it never occurred for a moment that
impending reality would surpass all their fantastic suppositions.

II

In the meantime, in the house, good news awaited them during the
dinner. Messrs. Rawlinson and Tarkowski, as skilled engineers, had been
invited a few weeks before, to examine and appraise the work carried on
in connection with the whole net-work of canals in the Province of
El-Fayum, in the vicinity of the city of Medinet near Lake Karun, as
well as along the Yusuf and Nile rivers. They were to stay there for
about a month and secured furloughs from their company. As the
Christmas holidays were approaching, both gentlemen, not desiring to be
separated from the children, decided that Stas and Nell should also go
to Medinet. Hearing this news the children almost leaped out of their
skins from joy. They had already visited the cities lying along the
Canal, particularly Ismailia and Suez, and while outside the Canal,
Alexandria and Cairo, near which they viewed the great pyramids and the
Sphinx. But these were short trips, while the expedition to Medinet
el-Fayum required a whole day's travel by railway, southward along the
Nile and then westward from El-Wasta towards the Libyan Desert. Stas
knew Medinet from the narratives of younger engineers and tourists who
went there to hunt for various kinds of water-fowls as well as desert
wolves and hyenas. He knew that it was a separate, great oasis lying
off the west bank of the Nile but not dependent upon its inundations
and having its water system formed by Lake Karun through Bahr Yusuf and
a whole chain of small canals. Those who had seen this oasis said that
although that region belonged to Egypt, nevertheless, being separated
from it by a desert, it formed a distinct whole. Only the Yusuf River
connects, one might say with a thin blue thread, that locality with the
valley of the Nile. The great abundance of water, fertility of soil,
and luxuriant vegetation made an earthly paradise of it, while the
extensive ruins of the city of Crocodilopolis drew thither hundreds of
curious tourists. Stas, however, was attracted mainly by the shores of
Lake Karun, with its swarms of birds and its wolf-hunts on the desert
hills of Gebel el-Sedment.

But his vacation began a few days later, and as the inspection of the
work on the canals was an urgent matter and the gentlemen could not
lose any time, it was arranged that they should leave without delay,
whi