"I don't see anything but big stones," said George.
"Let's see who gets there first," cried Nabul; and giving the donkeys a tap away the boys raced, the Pasha being the first to come to a halt beside the palm-trees.
"Now I can see that one of the stones is a house, Uncle Ben," cried George as they drew up closer.
There were some natives standing on the little landing of the minaret of the mosque, which no village hereabouts is without, whether it be large or small, and the children lost no time in following their example and climbing up the crazy stairs which wound around inside the slim tower.
The view round about was wonderfully varied. On one side stretched away the sandy desert, where the Bedouin shepherds guarded their flocks of goats, leading them from one little oasis to another, wherever they could find enough herbage to make a meal. On the other side was the flowering river-bottom of the Nile, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world.
Just beside the mosque was a great grove of date palms, and George thought it very strange, and very much to his liking, too, that he could reach out his hand just beyond the gallery railing and pick the golden dates. "How I should like to come up here every day," he said as they made their way down to the ground.
Just before the entrance to the mosque was a great stone statue which astonished George and his uncle very much. The natives, too, evidently had a great regard for it, as they had planted a lot of low-growing, flowering trees all about it, sheltering it as if it were in a bower.
"How long do you suppose it has been here, Uncle Ben?" asked George, as he took his seat on the broad foot of the big statue.
"A long, long time, certainly, my boy," replied his uncle, "perhaps thousands of years."
After admiring the great statue awhile longer they discovered Mustapha sitting on the shady terrace of a coffee shop. He was drinking another of those little cups of muddy-looking, sweetish Turkish coffee of which the Egyptians are so fond. Uncle Ben, too, liked it very much, for it was usually made of the purest of Mocha coffee which comes from the other side of the Red Sea not far away from Egypt, so he too stopped for a cup, the boys meanwhile wandering off with the little girls quite by themselves.