“Well, I want Egypt!” declared Perry, with the characteristic insistence of his years.
“You’ll get plenty of ‘Egypt,’ as you call it,” his friend cautioned. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised, Perry, if, in the desert, you didn’t wish many a time for this climate of Alexandria, where it can be cool and rainy and where even wildflowers grow.” He pointed to some flowering weeds. “You’ll be hungry for a sight of something fresh and full of life like that before you’ve finished this trip.”
“P’raps! But I don’t care how soon the desert comes,” insisted Perry. “I don’t think much of this!” And he awaited with impatience the starting of the train to Cairo.
Soon, however, his mood changed. As the train cleared the villas of the suburbs of Alexandria, skirting the coast, curved round the northern edge of Lake Maryut and struck across the Delta, his momentary peevishness at the non-Egyptian character of Alexandria vanished. A glimpse of a stream with a forest of masts and yards that looked like things of a dream, so slender were they, wrung from him an exclamation of astonishment.
“Look, Antoine,” he said, “there’s the old Nile!”
“No, no,” answered the other, “that’s the Mahmoudieh Canal. And it’s not old, it’s quite new, not a century old yet. It is the canal that has made Alexandria the principal port of Egypt instead of the old Egyptian ports of Rosetta and Damietta. The traffic on the canal is exceedingly heavy.”
“And are those spidery things the masts of ships on the canal?”
“Why not?”
“They look as if the first puff of wind would snap every one of them.”
“Yet they are masts, Perry, the spars of the gyassas or barges. They do look as though they were made of spider webs, but I suppose they must be strong. All the Nile barges are built that way.”