This ferry does, perhaps, afford some remote chance of
adventure, as was found the other day, when a carriage was allowed
to run down the bank, in which was sitting a native prince, the heir
to the pasha's throne. On that occasion the adventure was important,
and the prince was drowned. But even this opportunity for incident
will soon disappear; for Mr. Brunel, or Mr. Stephenson, or Mr. Locke,
or some other British engineering celebrity, is building a railway
bridge over the Nile, and then the modern traveller's heart will be
contented, for he will be able to sleep all the way from Alexandria
to Cairo.

Mr. Shepheard's hotel at Cairo is to an Englishman the centre
of Egypt, and there our two friends stopped. And certainly our
countrymen have made this spot more English than England itself.
If ever John Bull reigned triumphant anywhere; if he ever shows
his nature plainly marked by rough plenty, coarseness, and good
intention, he does so at Shepheard's hotel. If there be anywhere a
genuine, old-fashioned John Bull landlord now living, the landlord of
the hotel at Cairo is the man. So much for the strange new faces and
outlandish characters which one meets with in one's travels.

I will not trouble my readers by a journey up the Nile; nor will
I even take them up a pyramid. For do not fitting books for such
purposes abound at Mr. Mudie's? Wilkinson and Bertram made both the
large tour and the little one in proper style. They got as least as
far as Thebes, and slept a night under the shade of King Cheops.

One little episode on their road from Cairo to the Pyramids, I will
tell. They had joined a party of which the conducting spirit was a
missionary clergyman, who had been living in the country for some
years, and therefore knew its ways. No better conducting spirit
for such a journey could have been found; for he joined economy to
enterprise, and was intent that everything should be seen, and that
everything should be seen cheaply.

Old Cairo is a village some three miles from the city, higher up the
river; and here, close to the Nilometer, by which the golden increase
of the river is measured, tourists going to the Pyramids are ferried
over the river. The tourists are ferried over, as also are the
donkeys on which the tourists ride. Now here arose a great financial
question. The reis or master of the ferry-boat to which the clerical
guide applied was a mighty man, some six feet high, graced with a
turban, as Arabs