2oS EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN.

experience and ability to organize the reception and arrange for the transport of the rapidly arriving stores, could have prevented a muddle that might have assumed the aspect of a calamity.

A correspondent who was at Assiout on the 25th of September gave an interesting picture of the scene there as witnessed on the bank, or, as a Southern American would call it, the levee: — "The brown-red Nile, with a thin line of green on the farther shore, was very picturesque in the declining light, and the donkeys on the land, beaten brutally with batons, but comfortable looking withal, and carrying each a sack of wheat or flour; the hideous buffaloes — surely the lean kine of Pharaoh's dream — drawing creaking wooden-wheeled wagons, or arabas as they are called throughout the Mussulman world; the nuggar and dahabeeahs in the water receiving and giving up freight, their pointed felucca-like yards clear against the tender Eastern sky, formed a picture that can never be presented in an illustrated paper, for it needed the colour and the Babel around — the Greek, Italian, and British oaths and execrations, the Arabic gabble, the hee-haws of the donkeys, the lowing of the kine, the growls of the camels, the snorting of the postal steamer on which we go in an hour, the hurry and rush of everything, here, there, and everywhere — to give it form and semblance. But one began to get an idea of the way in which the mighty works of Egyptian antiquity were made when one saw the endless lines of men of every type toiling under loads of now two or three sticks of wood, which a boy of eight in England would think it a ' lark ' to carry, or a box of compressed beef, or of tea, or of what you will, weighing from 40 lbs. to 56 lbs., in every case with precisely the same amount of apparent exertion, and in every case with precisely the same aspect of mere beasts of burden. Yet here were not only negroes from the Soudan and the Congo and the Niam Niam country — freed negroes many of them — but Turks of unmistakable type; red men — not the Iroquois we are promised, but the middle race here; simple fellaheen, Arabs of more or less pure type; and here and there a Levantine of a sort — a handsome piratical sort — Byron wrote about, which some of us have seen at Athens and Syra, and among the Archipelago, which is half