Was I right?

by Mrs. O. F. Walton

WAS IT HE?

EARLY on Saturday morning we arrived at Port Said, and Sir William proposed that we should go on shore and escape from our uncomfortable quarters in the dirty little steamer.

We had no difficulty in obtaining a boat rowed by Arabs, but immediately we touched land, we were marched off to the Custom House, that our passports might be examined. Sir William had been told in London that passports were now quite unnecessary, so we had not provided ourselves with any, and he was rather at a loss what to do. However, Mr. Stanley came to the rescue, and after he had harangued the Turkish officers in Arabic, and had given them a proper amount of "baksheesh," we were politely bowed out of the office and allowed to enter the town, although we had no passports.

Here Mr. Stanley left us, and we found our way to the one hotel of the place, where we had breakfast amidst a crowd of English and American travellers, who we found were to be our companions into Syria.

The hotel was uncomfortably small and very noisy, so after breakfast we took a walk to see what was to be seen in Port Said.

It was such a curious town; it looked as if it had sprung up in a single night like a mushroom. Nearly all the houses were made of wood, and looked like large booths put up hastily for a pleasure fair, to be taken down again as soon as the fair was over.

The streets, or rather the empty spaces between the rows of houses, for they did not deserve the name of streets, were covered with orange-peel, oyster-shells, dead dogs and cats, decaying vegetables, and all manner of filth; and the whole place looked, Sir William said, like pictures he had seen of the wooden towns set up near the gold-diggings in America.

We met people of almost every nationality in the streets of Port Said. Many of them were very unprepossessing in appearance, and we were told that a number of the worst men of all nations find their way there, for they know that there is very little law or order in the town, and that they will therefore be free from observation, and allowed to do as they like.

The week before we arrived at Port Said there had been a great many murders there, and we saw a notice in the hotel advising Europeans not to go out after dark, as the authorities would not answer for the consequences if they did so.