GEORGE WALKER AT SUEZ.

Of all the spots on the world’s surface that I, George Walker, of Friday Street, London, have ever visited, Suez in Egypt, at the head of the Red Sea, is by far the vilest, the most unpleasant, and the least interesting.  There are no women there, no water, and no vegetation.  It is surrounded, and indeed often filled, by a world of sand.  A scorching sun is always overhead; and one is domiciled in a huge cavernous hotel, which seems to have been made purposely destitute of all the comforts of civilised life.  Nevertheless, in looking back upon the week of my life which I spent there I always enjoy a certain sort of triumph;—or rather, upon one day of that week, which lends a sort of halo not only to my sojourn at Suez, but to the whole period of my residence in Egypt.

I am free to confess that I am not a great man, and that, at any rate in the earlier part of my career, I had a hankering after the homage which is paid to greatness.  I would fain have been a popular orator, feeding myself on the incense tendered to me by thousands; or failing that, a man born to power, whom those around him were compelled to respect, and perhaps to fear.  I am not ashamed to acknowledge this, and I believe that most of my neighbours in Friday Street would own as much were they as candid and open-hearted as myself.

It is now some time since I was recommended to pass the first four months of the year in Cairo because I had a sore-throat.  The doctor may have been right, but I shall never divest myself of the idea that my partners wished to be rid of me while they made certain changes in the management of the firm.  They would not otherwise have shown such interest every time I blew my nose or relieved my huskiness by a slight cough;—they would not have been so intimate with that surgeon from St. Bartholomew’s who dined with them twice at the Albion; nor would they have gone to work directly that my back was turned, and have done those very things which they could not have done had I remained at home.  Be that as it may, I was frightened and went to Cairo, and while there I made a trip to Suez for a week.

I was not happy at Cairo, for I knew nobody there, and the people at the hotel were, as I thought, uncivil.  It seemed to me as though I were allowed to go in and out merely by sufferance; and yet I paid my bill regularly every week.  The house was full of company, but the company was made up of parties of twos and threes, and they all seemed to have their own friends.  I did make attempts to overcome that terrible British exclusiveness, that noli me tangere with which an Englishman arms himself; and in which he thinks it necessary to envelop his wife; but it was in vain, and I found myself sitting down to breakfast and dinner, day after day, as much alone as I should do if I called for a chop at a separate table in the Cathedral Coffee-house.  And yet at breakfast and dinner I made one of an assemblage of thirty or forty people.  That I thought dull.

But as I stood one morning on the steps before the hotel, bethinking myself that my throat was as well as ever I remembered it to be, I was suddenly slapped on the back.  Never in my life did I feel a more pleasant sensation, or turn round with more unaffected delight to return a friend’s greeting.  It was as though a cup of water had been handed to me in the desert.  I knew that a cargo of passengers for Australia had reached Cairo that morning, and were to be passed on to Suez as soon as the railway would take them, and did not therefore expect that the greeting had come from any sojourner in Egypt.  I should perhaps have explained that the even tenor of our life at the hotel was disturbed some four times a month by a flight through Cairo of a flock of travellers, who like locusts eat up all that there was eatable at the Inn for the day.  They sat down at the same tables with us, never mixing with us, having their separate interests and hopes, and being often, as I thought, somewhat loud and almost selfish in the expression of them.  These flocks consisted of passengers passing and repassing by the overland route to and from India and Australia; and had I nothing else to tell, I should delight to describe all that I watched of their habits and manners—the outward bound being so different in their traits from their brethren on their return.  But I have to tell of my own triumph at Suez, and must therefore hasten on to say that on turning round quickly with my outstretched hand, I found it clasped by John Robinson.

“Well, Robinson, is this you?”  “Holloa, Walker, what are you doing here?”  That of course was the style of greeting.  Elsewhere I should not have cared much to meet John Robinson, for he was a man who had never done well in the world.  He had been in business and connected with a fairly good house in Sise Lane, but he had married early, and things had not exactly gone well with him.  I don’t think the house broke, but he did; and so he was driven to take himself and five children off to Australia.  Elsewhere I should not have cared to come across him, but I was positively glad to be slapped on the back by anybody on that landing-place in front of Shepheard’s Hotel at Cairo.

I soon learned that Robinson with his wife and children, and indeed with all the rest of the Australian cargo, were to be passed on to Suez that afternoon, and after a while I agreed to accompany their party.  I had made up my mind, on coming out from England, that I would see all the wonders of Egypt, and hitherto I had seen nothing.  I did ride on one day some fifteen miles on a donkey to see the petrified forest; but the guide, who called himself a dragoman, took me wrong or cheated me in some way.  We rode half the day over a stony, sandy plain, seeing nothing, with a terrible wind that filled my mouth with grit, and at last the dragoman got off.  “Dere,” said he, picking up a small bit of stone, “Dis is de forest made of stone.  Carry that home.”  Then we turned round and rode back to Cairo.  My chief observation as to the country was this—that whichever way we went, the wind blew into our teeth.  The day’s work cost me five-and-twenty shillings, and since that I had not as yet made any other expedition.  I was therefore glad of an opportunity of going to Suez, and of making the journey in company with an acquaintance.

At that time the railway was open, as far as I remember, nearly half the way from Cairo to Suez.  It did not run four or five times a day, as railways do in other countries, but four or five times a month.  In fact, it only carried passengers on the arrival of these flocks passing between England and her Eastern possessions.  There were trains passing backwards and forwards constantly, as I perceived in walking to and from the station; but, as I learned, they carried nothing but the labourers working on the line, and the water sent into the Desert for their use.  It struck me forcibly at the time that I should not have liked to have money in that investment.

Well; I went with Robinson to Suez.  The journey, like everything else in Egypt, was sandy, hot, and unpleasant.  The railway carriages were pretty fair, and we had room enough; but even in them the dust was a great nuisance.  We travelled about ten miles an hour, and stopped about an hour at every ten miles.  This was tedious, but we had cigars with us and a trifle of brandy and water; and in this manner the railway journey wore itself away.  In the middle of the night, however, we were moved from the railway carriages into omnibuses, as they were called, and then I was not comfortable.  These omnibuses were wooden boxes, placed each upon a pair of wheels, and supposed to be capable of carrying six passengers.  I was thrust into one with Robinson, his wife and five children, and immediately began to repent of my good-nature in accompanying them.  To each vehicle were attached four horses or mules, and I must acknowledge that