606 JOUENEY TO CENTBAL AFB1CA.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

VOYAGE DOWN THE NILE.

Assouan— A Boat for Cairo — English Tourists— A Head-wind— Ophthalmia— Esneh- -A Mummied Princess — Ali Effendfs Stories — A Donkey Afrite — Arrival at Luxor — The Egyptian Autumn— A Day at Thebes— Songs of the Sailors — Ali leaves me — Eide to Dendera — Head-winds again — Visit to Tahtah — The House of Bufaa Bey.

I beached the Egyptian frontier on the morning of the sixteenth of March, having been forty days in making the journey from Khartoum. Immediately upon our arrival, I took a donkey and rode around the Cataract to Assouan, leaving Ali to take care of the baggage-camels. I went directly to the beach, where a crowd of vessels were moored, in expectation of the caravans of gum from the South. An Egyptian Bey, going to Khartoum in the train of Rustum Pasha, had arrived the day before in a small dahabiyeh, and the captain thereof immediately offered it to me for the return to Cairo. It was a neat and beautiful little vessel, with a clean cabin, couch, divan, and shady portico on deck. He asked twelve hundred piastres ; I offered him nine hundred ; we agreed on a thousand, and when my camels arrived there was a new refuge prepared for my household gods. I set Achmet to work at get-