CHAPTER IV THROUGH OLD EGYPT TO CAIRO ON MY way to Cairo I have taken a run through i the delta, crossing Lower Egypt to the Suez " Canal and returning through the Land of Goshen. The soil is as rich and the grass is as green now as it was when Joseph picked out this land as the best in Egypt for his famine-stricken father Jacob. Fat cattle by the hun¬ dreds grazed upon the fields, camels with loads of hay weighing about a ton upon their backs staggered along the black roads. Turbaned Egyptians rode donkeys through the fields, and the veiled women of this Moslem land crowded about the train at the villages. On one side a great waste of dazzling yellow sand came close to the edge of the green fields, and we passed grove after grove of date-palm trees holding their heads proudly in the air, and shaking their fan-like leaves to every passing breeze. They seemed to whisper a requiem over the dead past of this oldest of the old lands of the world.

As we neared Cairo and skirted the edge of the desert, away off to the right against the hazy horizon rose three ghost-like cones of gray out of the golden sand. These were the Pyramids, and the steam engine of the twentieth century whistled out a terrible shriek as we came in sight of them. To the left were the Mokattam Hills, with the citadel which Saladin built upon them, while to the right 22