RIDE TO THE PYRAMIDS. 5 the first four or five days the eggs were exposed to smoke as well as heat, and that when the birds began to pick the shell, which generally took place in fifteen days, they were placed in another oven and carefully accouched.

The rising sun shone redly on the Pyramids, as we rode out on the broad harvest land of the Nile. The black, unctuous loain was still too moist from the inundation to be ploughed, except in spots, here and there, but even where the water had scarce evaporated, millions of germs were pushing their slender blades up to the sunshine. In that prolific soil, the growth of grain is visible from day to day. The Fellahs were at work on all sides, preparing for planting, and the ungainly buffaloes drew their long ploughs slowly through the soil.

Where freshly turned, the earth had a rich, soft lustre, like dark-brown velvet, beside which the fields of young wheat, beans and lentils, glittered with the most brilliant green. The larks sang in the air and flocks of white pigeons clustered like blossoms on the tops of the sycamores. There, in November, it was the freshest and most animating picture of Spring.

The direct road to the Pyramids was impassable, on account of the water, and we rode along the top of a dyke, intersected by canals, to the edge of the Libyan Desert—a distance of nearly ten miles. The ruptures in the dyke obliged us occasionally to dismount, and at the last canal, which cuts off the advancing sands from the bounteous plain on the other side, our donkeys were made to swim, while we were carried across on the shoulderb of two naked Arabs. They had run out in advance to meet us, hailing us with many English and French phrases, while half a dozen boys, with earthen bottles which they had just filled from the slimy canal, crowded after them, 3*