with names of hotels on the gold-laced caps of underporters you can hardly step out for swarms of Arabs, who fight for your baggage. On the night of July 12, the platform showed gaunt and large and empty. The streets were hardly better-a few listless Arabs in the square outside the station, and then avenue on avenue of silent darkness.

By daylight Cairo looked like a ball-room the morning after. One hotel was shamelessly making up a rather battered face against next season. The verandah of Shepheard's, where six months ago you could not move for tea-tables, nor hear the band for the buzz of talk, was quite empty and lifeless; only one perspiring waiter hinted that this was a hotel. The Continental, the centre of Cairene fashion, had a whole wing shuttered up; the mirrors in the great hall were blind with whiting, and naked suites of bedroom furniture camped out in the great dining-room. Some shops were shut; the rest wore demi-toilettes of shutter and blind; the dozing shopkeepers seemed half-resentful that anybody should wish to buy in such weather. As for scarabs and necklaces and curiosities of Egypt, they no longer pretended to think that any sane man could give money for such things. As you looked out from the Citadel, Cairo seemed dazed under the sun; the very Pyramids looked as if they were taking a holiday.

All that was no more than you expected: you knew that no tourists came to Egypt in July. But native

Egypt was out of season too. The streets that clacked with touts and beggars, that jingled with every kind of hawker's rubbish-you passed along them down a vista of closed jalousies and saw not a soul, heard not a sound. The natives must be somewhere, only where ? A few you saw at road-making, painting, and the like jobs of an off-season. But every native was dull, listless, hanging from his stalk, half dead. Eyes were languid and lustreless: the painter's head drooped and swayed from side to side, and the brush almost fell from his lax fingers. In the narrow bevel of shadow left under a wall by the high sun, flat on back or face, open-mouthed, half asleep, half fainting, gasped Arab Cairo-the parasite of the tourist in his holiday, the workman leaving his work, donkey-boy and donkey flat and panting together.

Well might they gasp and pant; for the air of Cairo was half dead too. You might drive in it at night and feel it whistle round you, but it did not refresh you. You might draw it into your lungs, but it did not fill them. The air had no quality in it, no body: it was thin, used up, motionless, too limp to live in. The air of August London is stale and close, poor; exaggerate it fifty-fold and you have the air of July Cairo. You wake up at night dull and flaccid and clammy with sweat, less refreshed than when you lay down. You live on what sleep you can pilfer during the hour of dawn. As you drive home at night

you envy the dark figure in a galabeah stretched on the pavement of Kasr-en-Nil bridge; there only in Cairo can you feel a faint stirring in the air.

To put all in one word, Egypt lacks its Nile. The all-fathering river is at his lowest and weakest. In places he is nearly dry, and what water he can give the cracked fields is pale, green, unfertile. He was beginning to rise now, slowly; presently would come the flood and the brown manuring water. The night wind would blow strongly over his broadened bosom, the green would spring out of the mud, and Egypt would be alive again.

Only in one place was she alive yet-and that was the Continental Hotel. Here all day sat and came and went clean-limbed young men in flannels, and at dinner-time the terrace was cool with white messjackets. Outside was the only crowd of natives in Cairo a thick line of Arabs squatting by the opposite wall, nursing testimonials earned or bought, cooks and valets and grooms-waiting to be hired to go up the Nile. Up at the citadel they would show you the great black up-standing 40-pounder guns with which they meant to breach Khartum. Out at Abbassieh the 21st Lancers were changing their troop-horses for lighter Syrians and country-breds. The barrack-yard of Kasr-en-Nil was yellow with tents, and under a breathless afternoon sun the black-belted Rifle Brigade marched in from the station to fill them. The wilted

Arabs hardly turned their heads at the band; the Rifles held their shoulders square and stepped out with a rattle.

The Egyptian may feel the sun; the Englishman must stand up and march in it. You see it is his country, and he must set an example. And seeing Egypt thus Nileless, bloodless, you felt more than ever that he must lose no time in taking into firm fingers the keys of the Nile above Khartum.

XXI.

GOING UP.

In

ON the half-lit Cairo platform servants flung agonised arms round brothers' necks, kissed them all over, and resigned themselves to the horrors of the Sudan. side the stuffy carriages was piled a confusion of bags and bundles, of helmet-cases and sword-cases, of canvas buckets cooling soda, and canvas bottles cooling water, of Beys and Bimbashis returning from leave. It was rather like the special train that takes boys back to school. A few had been home-but the Sirdar does not like to have too many of his officers seen in Piccadilly; it doesn't look well. Some had been to Constantinople, to Brindisi and back for the sea, to San Stefano, the Ostend of Egypt, to Cairo and no farther. Like schoolboys, they had all been wild to get away, and now they were all wild to get back. Thank the Lord, no more Cairo-sweat all the night instead of sleep, and mosquitos tearing you to pieces. Give me the night-breeze of the desert and the clean sand of the Sudan