I was as yet, though not perhaps even then enthusiastically so, a believer in the common English creed that England had a providential mission in the East, and that our wars were only waged there for honest and beneficent reasons. Nothing was further from my mind than that we English ever could be guilty, as a nation, of a great betrayal of justice in arms for our mere selfish interests.
Neither need I say anything in detail about Cairo, through which we passed that day without stopping longer than to ask for our letters at the Consulate.
Our object was to see the country districts and not to waste time on a city already in part European, and we thought to find camping ground immediately beyond the Nile. So we rode on.
We did not understand the entreaties of our camel-men that we should alight and let them and their camels go back, or realize that we were doing them an injustice by forcing them to break the tribal rule which forbade them as Bedouins of the eastern desert to cross over to the west.
In spite of their expostulations we held on our way by the Kasr-el-Nil bridge and the road to Ghizeh. We had caught sight of the Pyramids and pushed on eagerly in their direction, and were only stopped by the failing light which overtook us at sunset close to the little fellah village of Tolbiya, the last but one before the Pyramids are reached.
It was there that we made our halt and alighted for the first time on the black soil of the Nile, as yet hardly dry from the autumn inundation.
The good people of Tolbiya, in their hearty fellah fashion, received us with all possible hospitality. Though living on the tourist road to the Pyramids and accustomed to treat Frank travellers in some sort as their prey, the fact of our alighting at