At this wharf we waited for two weary hours and a half, cold and breakfastless, till a train, dirtier than any we have ever previously seen, arrived to take us to Suez.
"Old, familiar Suez," say some of the passengers; "just the same as ever," with her awful wastes, her salt marshes, strewn with rusty bolts and ends of iron, her mud huts and pariah dogs,—the dreary desert scene.
At Suez we looked forward to breakfast. Rejecting the offer of the donkey-boy, pointing to his donkey with a persuasive "Quite a masher," we walked through the road, ankle-deep in sand, when "Bond Street" led us to the "Hotel de Suez," on the quay. Small chance was there among the collective passengers of three ships just arrived of getting anything like a comfortable breakfast, and the scramble for food that ensued was a painful sight. We felt glad we had not left the ship to sleep at the hotel last night when we heard that a few nights ago three generals had been "doubled up" (as it was expressively told us by a soldier) in one room, and three colonels in the next. The place was swarming with soldiers, military chests, tin cases, bundles of bedding, &c., just landed and awaiting orders to proceed to Suakim.
At length we started in the train over the line which gives us our first impression of the desert. The vast expanse of waterless, wasteless sand, parched and glaring, weary even unto death, where life can have no attraction left for man or beast, where all is desolate and dead to life. How intense then must be the longing for the "shadow of the Great Rock in the weary land!"
Yet under the influence of the late Sir Herbert Stewart's brilliant march through the desert, yet under the excitement of our hard-won victory at Abu Klea, and later, that at Metammeh, we think with a realizing anguish of the horrors of the prolonged marches, the deadly thirst our men must have endured.
Here our eyes find some relief in patches of bulrushes and the blue strip of water of the canal, where we see the line of steamers slowly passing along in single file, each appearing to chafe at the slow progress of the foremost one. The Messagerie leads the way, followed by our Brindisi, in its turn followed by the Ballarat—in the order in which they entered the canal this morning. At its widest part the canal opens out into an inland lake.
Again our hearts are stirred as we approach the scene of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir—as we see the roughly thrown-up entrenchments behind which the Arabs lay hidden as our troops came ever onwards, cautiously and noiselessly, for it was the night of the now famous "Silent March." We could hear the British cheer, the maddening rush, the wild swoop which carried all before it. We saw the bridge over which the frantic retreat was made; we saw, too, the green cemetery by the line, where a few white stones mark the graves of those who were left still and cold on that battle-field.
There are no remains to be seen from the railway line, no carcases or bleached bones, no skeletons of camels or broken weapons, but only the long, long rows of low entrenchments, like a sandbank, extending for two or three miles.
At Zagazig we had luncheon, and a very dirty journey brought us to within sight of Cairo, whose first and distant view is disenchanting. It looks little more than a large native village, with a citadel and a few minaret towers. My husband's brother—the Financial Adviser to the Egyptian Government, met us at the station and we drove to his house—made beautiful by his splendid collection of embroideries that have been drawn from the wealth of such stores in the bazaars of Constantinople, Broussa, Egypt, and Arabia.
We feel in the world once more; we have returned to civilization.