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 vegetation and seemed to be travelling on dry land. This curious effect, which always causes surprise, is often met with in the neighbourhood of Leyden, Dordrecht, and Haarlem, and in swampy countries where the water lies level with the ground, and sometimes even, kept in by dikes, is higher than the level of the country by several yards.

Where the salt water ends, the aspect of the country changes, not gradually, but suddenly; on the one hand absolute barrenness, on the other exuberant vegetation; and wherever irrigation brings a drop of water, plants spring up, and the sterile dust becomes fertile soil. The contrast is most striking. We had passed Lake Mareotis, and on either side of the railroad stretched fields of doora or maize, of cotton plants in various stages of growth, some opening their pretty yellow flowers, others shedding the white silk from their pods. Gutters full of muddy water rayed the black ground with lines that shone here and there in the light. These were fed by broader canals connected with the Nile. Small dikes of earth, easily opened with a blow of a pickaxe, dammed up the waters until watering-time. The rough wheels of the sakiehs, turned by buffaloes, oxen, camels, or asses, raised the water to higher levels. Sometimes, even, two robust fellahs, perfectly naked, tawny and shining like Florentine bronzes, standing on the edge of a canal and balancing like a swing a basket of waterproof esparto suspended from two ropes of which they held the ends, skimmed the surface of the water and dashed it into the neighbouring field with amazing dexterity. Fellahs in short blue tunics were ploughing, holding the handle of a primitive plough drawn by a camel and a humpbacked Soudanese ox; others gathered cotton and maize; others dug ditches; others again dragged branches of trees by way of a harrow over the furrows which the inundation had scarce left. Everywhere was seen an activity not much in accord with the traditional Oriental idleness.

The first fellahin villages seen on the right and left of the road impress one curiously. They are collections of huts of unbaked brick cemented with mud, with flat roofs occasionally topped with a sort of whitewashed turret for pigeons, the sloping walls of which faintly recall the outline of a truncated Egyptian pylon. A door as low as that of a tomb, and two or three holes pierced in the wall are the only openings in these huts, which look more like the work of termites than that of men. Often half the village—if such a name can be given to these earthen huts—has been washed away by the rains or sapped by the flood; but no great harm is done; with a few handfuls of mud the house is soon rebuilt, and five or six days of sunshine suffice to make it inhabitable.

This description, scrupulously exact, does not give a very attractive idea of a fellahin village; but plant by the side of these cubes of gray earth a clump of date palms, have a camel or two kneel down in front of the doors, which look like the mouths of warrens, let a woman come out from one of them draped in her long blue gown, holding a child by the hand and bearing a jar of water on her head, light it all up with sunlight, and you have a charming and characteristic picture.

The thing which strikes the most inattentive traveller as soon as he steps into this Lower Egypt, where from time immemorial the Nile has been accumulating its mud in thin layers, is the close intimacy of the fellah and the earth. Autochthone is the name that best fits him; he springs from the clay which he treads, he is made out of it, and scarce has emerged from it. He manipulates it, presses it as a child presses its nurse's breast, to draw from its brown bosom the milk of fertility. He sinks waist-deep into its fertile mud, drains it, waters it, dries it, according to its needs; cuts canals in it, builds up levees upon it, draws from it the clay with which he constructs his family dwelling and with which he will cement his tomb. Never was a respectful son more careful of his old mother; he does not leave her as do those vagabond children who forsake their natal roof in search of adventures. He remains there, always attentive to the least want of his antique ancestor, the black earth of KamÉ. If she thirsts, he gives her drink, if she is troubled by too much humidity, he dries it; in order not to wound her, he works her almost without tools, with his hands; his plough merely scratches the telluric skin, which the inundation covers each year with a new epidermis. As you watch him going and coming upon that soaking ground, you feel that he is in his element. In his blue garment, which resembles a pontiff's robe, he presides over the marriage of earth and water, he unites the two principles which, warmed by the sun, give birth to life. Nowhere is this harmony between man and the soil so visible; nowhere does the earth play so important a part. It imparts its colour to everything. The houses have the earth tint; the bronze complexion of the fellahs recalls it; the trees covered with fine dust, the waters laden with mud, conform to that fundamental harmony; the animals themselves wear its livery; the dun-coloured camel, the gray ass, the slate-blue buffalo, the ash-coloured pigeon, and the reddish birds all fit in with the general tone.

Another thing which surprises one is the animation visible throughout the country. On the levees along the canals and on those which traverse the inundated portions, there moves a mob of passers-by and of travellers. There is no road so frequented in France, even in the neighbourhood of a populous city. Eastern people do not remain much in their houses, and the smallest pretext is sufficient for them to set forth, especially as they have not to think, as we have, of the weather; the barometer is always at set fair, and rain is so uncommonly rare that a man would be glad to get a soaking.

There is nothing more enjoyable, more varied and instructive than the procession of people who are going about their business and who show in succession in the opening of the carriage window, as in a frame in which engravings or water-colours are constantly changing.

First, camels ambling along with a resigned and melancholy look, swinging their long necks, curious animals whose awkward shapes recall the attempts of a vanished creation. On the hump of the foremost is perched the turbaned driver, as majestic as Eleazar, the servant of Abraham, going to Mesopotamia to seek a wife for Isaac; he yields with lazy suppleness to the rough, but regular motions of the animal; sometimes smoking his chibouque as if he were seated at the door of a cafÉ, or pressing the slow pace of his steed. Camels like to go in single file; they are accustomed to it, and five or six are usually tied together, sometimes even more; and thus the caravan travels along, showing quaint against the flat lines of the horizon, and for want of any object of comparison, apparently of vast size. On either side of the line trot three or four swift-footed lads, armed with wands; for in the East beasts of burden never lack hostlers and whippers-in. Some of the camels are reddish, others sorrel, others brown, some even are white, but dun is the most frequent colour. They carry stones, wood, grass bound with esparto cords, bundles of sugar-cane, boxes, furniture,—in fact, whatever in our country would be loaded on carts. Just now we might have thought ourselves in Holland as we passed along those gray stretches of submerged ground, but the illusion is soon dispelled; as the camel swings along the canal bank, you feel that you are approaching Cairo, and not Amsterdam.

Next come horsemen, bestriding thin, but spirited horses; droves of small donkeys, their masters perched on their cruppers, almost on their tails, their legs almost touching the ground, ready to be used in case the tricky animal falls or jibs, or even indulges, as it often does, in a roll in the dust of the road. In the East the ass is neither contemned nor considered ridiculous as it is in France; it has preserved its Homeric and biblical nobility, and every one bestrides it without hesitation, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, women as well as men.

Now along the canal comes a charming group: a young woman robed in a long blue mantle, the folds of which fall chastely around her, is seated upon an ass which a man, still vigorous but whose beard is already streaked with gray and white hairs, leads carefully. In front of the mother, who supports it with one hand, is a naked child, exquisitely beautiful, happy and delighted at his trip. It is a picture of the Flight into Egypt; the figures lack nothing but a fine golden halo around their heads. The Virgin, the Child Jesus, and Saint Joseph must have looked like that, and so must their flight have been in the living and simple reality; their equipage was not much finer. What a pity that some great painter, Perugino, Raphael, or Albert DÜrer, does not happen to be here.

DamanhÛr, which the railroad traverses, looks very much as must have looked the ancient cities of Egypt, now buried under the sand or fallen into dust. It is surrounded by sloping walls built of unbaked bricks or of pisÉ which preserves its earthy colour. The flat-roofed houses rise one above another like a collection of cubes dotted with little black holes. A few dovecotes, the cupolas of which are whitewashed, and one or two minarets striped with red and white, alone impart to the antique appearance of that city the modern aspect of Islamism. On the top of the terraces women, squatting on mats or standing in their long robes of brilliant colours, are looking at us, no doubt attracted by the passing of the train. As they show against the sky, they are wondrously elegant and graceful. They look like statues erected on the top of buildings or the front of temples.

The moment the train stopped, it was invaded by a band of women and children, offering fresh water, bitter oranges, and honey confections to the travellers; and it was delightful to see these brown faces showing at the carriage window their bright smile and their white teeth. I should have liked to remain some time in DamanhÛr, but travel, like life, is made up of sacrifices. How many delightful things one is compelled to leave by the roadside, if one wishes to reach the end. A man cannot see everything, and must be satisfied with seeing a few things. So I had to leave DamanhÛr and to behold that dream from afar without being able to traverse it. As far as I could see, even through my glass, the land reached to the horizon line, intersected by canals, broken by gutters, shimmering with pools of water, with scattered clumps of sycamore trees and date palms, with long strips of cultivated ground, water-wheels rising here and there, and enlivened by the incessant coming and going of the labourers who followed, on the backs of camels, horses, or asses, or on foot, the narrow road bordering the levees. At intervals there arose, under the shade of a mimosa, the white cupola of a tomb; sometimes a nude child stood motionless on the edge of the water in the attitude of unconscious reverie, not even turning his head to see the train fly along. This deep gravity in childhood is peculiar to the East. What could that boy, standing on his lump of earth as a Stylites on his pillar, be thinking of? From time to time flocks of pigeons, busy feeding, flew off with a sudden whir as the train passed by, and alighted farther away on the plain; aquatic birds swam swiftly through the reeds that outstretched behind them, pretty wagtails hopped about, wagging their tails, on the crest of the levees; and in the heavens at a vast height, soared hawks, falcons, and gerfalcons, sweeping in great circles. Buffaloes wallowed in the mud of the ditches, and flocks of black sheep with hanging ears, very like goats, were hurrying along driven by the shepherds. The antique simplicity of the costume of the young herdsmen, with their short tunics, white or blue, faded by the sun, their bare legs, their dusty, naked feet, their felt caps, their crooks, recalled the patriarchal scenes of the Bible.

At the next station we stopped, and I got out to have a look at the landscape. I had scarcely gone a few steps when a wondrous sight met my astonished eyes: before me was the Nile, old Hapi, to give it its ancient Egyptian name, the inexhaustible Father of Waters. Through one of those involuntary plastic impressions which act upon the imagination, the Nile called up to my mind the colossal marble god in one of the lower halls of the Louvre, carelessly leaning on his elbow and, with paternal kindliness, allowing himself to be climbed over by the little children which represent cubits, and the various phases of the inundation. Well, it was not under this mythological aspect that the great river appeared to me for the first time. It was flowing in flood, spreading out broadly like a torrent of reddish mud which scarcely looked like water as it swelled and rushed by irresistibly. It looked like a river of soil; scarcely did the reflection of the sky imprint here and there upon the gloomy surface of its tumultuous waves a few light touches of azure. It was still almost at the height of its rise, but the flood had the tranquil power of a regular phenomenon, and not the convulsive disorder of a scourge. The majesty of that vast sheet of water laden with fertilising mud produces an almost religious impression. How many vanished civilisations have been reflected for a time in that ever-flowing wave! I remained absorbed as I gazed at it, sunk in thought, and feeling that strange sinking of the heart which one experiences after desire has been fulfilled, and reality has taken the place of the dream. What I was looking at was indeed the Nile, the real Nile, the river which I had so often endeavoured to discover by intuition. A sort of stupor nailed me to the bank, and yet it was a very natural thing that I should come across the Nile in Egypt in the very centre of the Delta. But man is subject to such artless astonishment.

DhahabÎyehs and felÛkas spreading their great lateen sails were tacking across the river, passing from one shore to the other, and recalling the shape of the mystic baris of the times of the Pharaohs.

We set out again. The aspect of the country was still the same; fields of cotton, maize, doora, stretched as far as the eye could reach. Here and there glimmered the portions of the ground covered by the flood. Slate-blue buffaloes wallowed in the pools and emerged covered with mud; water birds stood along the edges, and sometimes flew off as the train passed, watched by families of fellahs, squatting on the banks of the ditches. Along the road travelled the endless procession of camels, asses, oxen, black goats, and foot-passengers, which enlivened to such an extent that peaceful, flat landscape. I had already noticed when in Holland the additional importance given to figures by a flat country; the lack of hills makes them stand out, and as they usually show against the sky they loom larger. I seemed to see pass by the zones of painted bassi-relievi representing agricultural scenes which occasionally formed part of the decoration of the halls of Egyptian tombs. Here and there rose villages or farms, the lines of whose sloping, earth-gray walls recalled the substructures of antique temples. Groups of sycamore and mimosa trees, set off by clumps of date palms, brought out the soft tones of the walls by the contrast of their rich verdure. Elsewhere I caught sight of fellahin huts surmounted by whitewashed dovecotes, placed side by side like beehives or the minarets of a mosque. We soon reached Tantah, a somewhat important town, to which the fine mosque of Seyd Ahmed Badouy attracts pilgrims twice a year, and the fairs of which are frequented by the caravans.

Tantah, from the railway station,—for the train does not stop long enough to allow travellers to visit the town,—has an animated and picturesque aspect. Amid the houses in the Arab style with their look-outs and their awnings, rise buildings in that Oriental-Italian style dear to persons of progress and of modern ideas, painted in soft colours, ochre, salmon, or sky-blue; flat-roofed clay huts; over all, the minarets of the mosque, the white cupolas of a few tombs, and the inevitable fig trees and palms rising above the low garden walls. Between the town and the station stretches waste ground, a sort of fair-ground, on which are camps, huts of reed or of date-palm branches, tents formed of old rags of cloth and sometimes of the linen of an unrolled turban. The inhabitants of these frail dwellings cook in the open air. The coffee is made, a cup at a time, in a small brass kettle, and on plates of tin are cooked the thin doora cakes. The fuel is camel's-dung. The fellahs suck eagerly the sweetish juice of the sugar-cane cut into short pieces, and the slices of watermelon show within the green skin their ripe, rosy, flesh, spotted with black seeds. Women, as graceful as statues, come and go, holding the end of their veil between their teeth so as to conceal one half of the face, and bearing on their heads Theban jars or copper vases; while the men, squatting on the ground or on small carpets, their knees up to their chins, forming an acute angle like the legs of locusts, in an attitude which no European could assume, and recalling the judges of Amenti ranged in rows one behind another on the papyri of funeral rituals, preserve that dreamy immobility so dear to Orientals when they have nothing to do; for to move about merely for exercise, as Christians do, strikes them as utter folly.

Dromedaries, alone or grouped in circles, kneeling under their burdens, stretch out their long legs on the sand, motionless in the burning sun. Asses, some of which are daintily harnessed, with saddles of red morocco rising in a boss on the withers, and with headstalls adorned with tufts, and others with an old carpet for a saddle-cloth, were waiting for the travellers who were to stop at Tantah to bear them from the station to the town. The donkey drivers, clothed in short blue and white tunics, bare-armed and bare-legged, their heads covered with a fez, a wand in their hand, and resembling the slender figures of shepherds or youths which are so exquisitely drawn on the bodies of Greek vases, stood near their animals in an indolent attitude, which they abandoned as soon as a chance customer came their way. Then they indulged in mad gesticulations, guttural cries, and fought with each other until the unfortunate tourist ran the risk of being torn to pieces or stripped of the best part of his garments. Tawny, wandering dogs with jackal ears, fallen indeed from their old position, and forgetting apparently that they counted Anubis, the dog-headed Anubis latrator, among their ancestors, passed in and out among the groups, but without taking the least interest in what was going on.

The bonds which in Europe unite the dog to man do not exist in the East; its social instinct has not been developed, its sympathies have not been appealed to; it has no master, and lives in a savage state. No services are asked of it, and it is not cared for; it has no home and dwells in holes which it makes, unless it stays in some open tomb; no one feeds it; it hunts for itself, gorging on dead bodies and unnamable dÉbris. There is a proverb which says that wolves do not eat each other; Eastern dogs are less scrupulous; they readily devour their sick, wounded, or dead companions. It seemed strange to me to see dogs which did not make any advances to me, and did not seek to be caressed, but maintained a proud and melancholy reserve.

Little girls in blue gowns and little negroes in white tunics came up to the carriages, offering pastry, cakes, bitter oranges, lemons, and apples,—yes, apples. Eastern people seem to be very fond of that acid Northern fruit which, along with wretched, granulous pears, forms part of every dessert, at which of course one never gets either pomegranates, or bananas, or dates, or oranges, or purple figs, or any native fruits, which are no doubt left to the common people.

The whistle of the engine sounded, and we were again carried away through that very humid and very green Delta. However, as we advanced there showed on the horizon lines of rosy land from which vegetable life was wholly absent. The sand of the desert advances with its waves, as sterile as those of the sea, eternally disturbed by the winds and beating upon the islet of cultivated earth surrounded and stormed by dusty foam, as upon a reef which it endeavours to cover up. In Egypt, whatever lies above the level of the flood is smitten with death. There is no transition; where stops Osiris, Typhon begins; here luxuriant vegetation, there not a blade of grass, not a bit of moss, not a single one of the adventurous plants which grow in solitary and lonely places,—nothing but ground-up sandstone without any mixture of loam. But if a drop of Nile water falls upon it, straightway the barren sand is covered with verdure. These strips of pale salmon-colour form a pleasant contrast with the rich tints of the great plain of verdure spread out before us.

Soon we came upon another arm of the Nile, the Phatnitic branch, which flows into the sea near Damietta. It is crossed by the railway, and on the other side lie the ruins of ancient Athrebys, over which has been built a fellahin village. The train sped along, and soon on the right, above the line of green, turning almost black in the dazzling light, showed in the azure distance the triangular silhouette of the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, appearing, from where I first beheld them, like a single mountain with a piece taken out of the summit. The marvellous clearness of the atmosphere made them appear nearer, and had I not been aware of the real distance I should have found it difficult to estimate it correctly. It is quite natural to catch sight of the pyramids as one approaches Cairo; it is to be expected and it is expected, yet the sight causes extraordinary emotion and surprise. It is impossible to describe the effect produced by that vaporous outline so faint that it almost melts into the colour of the sky, and that, if one had not been forewarned, it might escape notice. Neither years nor barbarians have been able to overthrow these artificial mountains, the most gigantic monuments, except, perhaps, the Tower of Babel, ever raised by man. For five thousand years they have been standing there,—almost as old as the world, according to the biblical account. Even our own civilisation, with its powerful methods of destruction, could scarcely manage to tear them down. The pyramids have seen ages and dynasties flow by like billows of sand, and the colossal Sphinx with its noseless face ever smiles at their feet with its ironical and mysterious smile. Even after they were opened they kept their secret, and yielded up but the bones of oxen by the side of an empty sarcophagus. Eyes that have been closed so long that Europe, perchance, had not emerged from the flood when those eyes beheld the light, gazed upon them from where I am; they are contemporaneous with vanished empires, with strange races of men since swept from the surface of the earth; they have beheld civilisations that we know nothing of; heard spoken the tongues which men seek to make out in hieroglyphics, known manners which would appear to us as strange as a dream. They have been there so long that the stars have changed their places, and they belong to a past so prodigiously fabulous that behind them the dawn of the world seems to shine.

While these thoughts flashed through my mind we were rapidly approaching Cairo,—Cairo, of which I had talked so often with poor GÉrard de Nerval, with Gustave Flaubert, and Maxime Du Camp, whose tales had excited my curiosity to the highest pitch. In the case of cities which one has desired to see from childhood, and which one has long inhabited in dreams, one is apt to conceive a fantastic notion which it is very difficult to efface, even in presence of reality. The sight of an engraving, of a picture, often forms a starting-point. My Cairo, built out of the materials of the "Thousand and One Nights," centred around the EzbekÎyeh Place, the strange painting of which Marilhat had sent from Egypt to one of the first exhibitions which followed the Revolution of July. Unless I am mistaken, it was his first picture, and whatever the perfection which he afterwards attained, I do not believe that he ever painted a work fuller of life, more individual, and more striking. It made a deep and curious impression upon me; I went time and again to see it; I could not take my eyes off it, and it exercised upon me a sort of nostalgic fascination. It was from that painting that my dreams started upon fantastic trips through the narrow streets of ancient Cairo once traversed by Caliph Haroun al Raschid and his faithful vizier Jaffier, under the disguise of slaves or common people. My admiration for the painting was so well known that Marilhat's family gave me, after the death of the famous artist, the pencil sketch of the subject made on the spot, and which he had used as a study for the finished work.

And now we had arrived. A great mob of carriages, asses, donkey drivers, porters, guides, dragomans, rioted in front of the railway station, which is at Boulah, a short distance from old Cairo. When we had recovered our luggage, and I had been installed with my friend in a handsome open carriage preceded by a saÏs, it was with secret delight that I heard the Egyptian providence which watched over us in its Nizam uniform and its magenta fez, call out to the coachman, "Hotel Shepheard, EzbekÎyeh Place." I was going to lodge in my dream.