CAIRO TO KISUMU its ruins now remains save this obelisk, which stands sixty feet above the ground in the midst of green crops. Not far from it two buffaloes, with cloths over their faces, went round and round pulling the bar which turns the great water-wheel of a squeaking sakieh. 1 found a few beggars asking for backsheesh and saw half-a-dozen Mohammedans sitting gossiping by the roadside; but there was nothing else except the green of the fields, with a bleak and bare desert stretching away beyond them and the shadowy ghosts of the Pyramids looming large on the distant hori¬ zon. The obelisk is almost the twin of the one in Central Park, New York, save that the hieroglyphics on its sides are more deeply cut and the bees have made their nests in many of the figures. Bees very like our honey bees swarm over the monuments of Egypt. I saw one colony living on the side of the Sphinx, and the whole of one sur¬ face of this obelisk is covered with their cells.

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