the staid composure of the Arabs, flicking thumb and
finger at the patient noses of the small hireable
donkeys and other beasts of burden, thrusting a warm
red face of inquiry into the shadowy recesses of odoriferous
bazaars, and sauntering at evening in the Esbekiyeh
Gardens, cigar in mouth and hands in pockets, looking
on the scene and behaving in it as if the whole place
were but a reflex of Earl’s Court Exhibition.
History affects the cheap tripper not at all; he regards
the Pyramids as “good building” merely,
and the inscrutable Sphinx itself as a fine target
for empty soda-water bottles, while perhaps his chiefest
regret is that the granite whereof the ancient monster
is hewn is too hard for him to inscribe his distinguished
name thereon. It is true that there is a punishment
inflicted on any person or persons attempting such
wanton work—a fine or the bastinado; yet
neither fine nor bastinado would affect the “tripper”
if he could only succeed in carving “’Arry”
on the Sphinx’s jaw. But he cannot, and
herein is his own misery. Otherwise he comports
himself in Egypt as he does at Margate, with no more
thought, reflection, or reverence than dignify the
composition of his far-off Simian ancestor.
Taking him all in all, he is, however, no worse, and
in some respects better, than the “swagger”
folk who “do” Egypt, or rather, consent
in a languid way to be “done” by Egypt.
These are the people who annually leave England on
the plea of being unable to stand the cheery, frosty,
and in every respect healthy winter of their native
country—that winter, which with its wild
winds, its sparkling frost and snow, its holly trees
bright with scarlet berries, its merry hunters galloping
over field and moor during daylight hours, and its
great log fires roaring up the chimneys at evening,
was sufficiently good for their forefathers to thrive
upon and live through contentedly up to a hale and
hearty old age in the times when the fever of travelling
from place to place was an unknown disease, and home
was indeed “sweet home.” Infected
by strange maladies of the blood and nerves, to which
even scientific physicians find it hard to give suitable
names, they shudder at the first whiff of cold, and
filling huge trunks with a thousand foolish things
which have, through luxurious habit, become necessities
to their pallid existences, they hastily depart to
the Land of the Sun, carrying with them their nameless
languors, discontents and incurable illnesses, for
which Heaven itself, much less Egypt, could provide
no remedy. It is not at all to be wondered at
that these physically and morally sick tribes of human
kind have ceased to give any serious attention as to
what may possibly become of them after death, or whether
there is any “after,” for they are
in the mentally comatose condition which precedes
entire wreckage of brain-force; existence itself has
become a “bore;” one place is like another,
and they repeat the same monotonous round of living
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