ike mounds. Many of these villages
have probably occupied the same site since the days of the Pharaohs, the
debris and rubbish of centuries have accumulated and been built upon
again and again as the unsubstantial mud dwellings have crumbled away,
until they have gradually developed into mounds that rise like huge
mole-hills above the plain, and on which the present houses are built.
Near each village is a graveyard, also forming a mound-like excrescence
on the dead level of the surrounding surface.

At intervals the train passes some stately white mansion, looking lovely
and picturesque enough for anything, peeping from a grove of date-palms
or other indigenous vegetation. The tall, slender palms with their
beautiful feathery foliage, lend a charm to the sunny Egyptian landscape
with its golden dawns and sunsets that is simply indescribable. There
seems no reason why every village on the whole delta should not be hiding
its ugliness beneath a grove of this charming vegetation. Further east,
near Fantah, nearly every village is found thus embowered, and date-palm
groves form a very conspicuous feature of the landscape. One need hardly
add that here the fellaheen look more intelligent, more prosperous and
happy.

At all the larger stations women come to the train with roast quails
stuffed with rice, which they sell at six-pence apiece, and at every
station along the line children bring water in the porous clay bottles of
the country. This latter is badly needed, for the train rattles along
most of the time in a stifling cloud of dust, that penetrates the car and
settles over one in incredible quantities.

During the afternoon we pass the battle-field of Tel-el-Kebre, the train
whisking right through the centre of Arabi Pasha's earthworks. Near the
battle-field is a little cemetery where the English soldiers killed in
the battle were buried. The cemetery is kept green and tidy, and
surrounded by a neat iron fence; amid the gray desert that begins at
Tel-el-Kebre this little cemetery is the only bright spot immediately
about. From Tel-el-Kebre to Suez the country is a sandy desert, where
sand-fences, like the snow-fences of the Rocky Mountains, have been found
necessary to protect the railway from the shifting sand. On this dreary
waste are seen herds of camels, happy, no doubt, as clams at high tide,
as they roam about and search for tough camel-thorn shrubs, that here and
there protrude above the wavy ridges of white s