There was so much of interest happening around them that the passengers could scarcely take time to eat their meals, and their disappointment in not reaching Cairo was almost forgotten.
"This has been to me one of the most interesting days of the trip. I will mark it with a red letter," said one of our party in the evening. "I do not regret the delay. I would not have missed those amusing and novel sights for anything."
When efforts were resumed at dawn on Saturday, the Amasis floated free, and before noon we arrived at Cairo. Our joyous trip on the Nile, with its pleasant associations of fellow voyagers, dragomen, donkey boys, temples, tombs, and gallops over the sand, was at an end.
CHAPTER XVI.
NAPLES AND POMPEII.
By noon on Sunday, March twenty-second, the various parties had reassembled as one large family on board the Moltke in the harbor of Alexandria, and shortly afterward they saw the land of the palms disappear from sight below the horizon. Friends and acquaintances who had chosen different excursions on land and had been separated for some time had many experiences to relate to one another. Some, who had taken the Damascus trip, gave a description of the magnificent ruins of the famous temple of Baalbek and of the enormous size of the granite blocks which lay scattered over the ground at that place, and displayed bargains in hammered brass and silken rugs which they had secured in the bazaars of the oldest city in the world. Others, who had taken a sail on blue Galilee and a journey on horseback through the interior of Palestine, told of the unexpected luxuries of camp life, of squalid villages and more squalid inhabitants, of bridgeless streams that had to be forded, of Arab camps and Bedouin chiefs, and of towns, mountains, plains, and wells, the names of which were familiar to the student of the Bible. They showed to their friends albums in which they had pressed the flowers gathered in villages where the Savior once strayed, or culled in fields through which He probably had trod. Some who had taken a carriage ride to the Dead Sea and the River Jordan described the loneliness of the road and the armed Bedouin protectors who accompanied them, the dilapidated condition of Jericho, the desolate shores and bitter salty taste of the Sea, the muddy banks of the River Jordan and a row on the rapid stream. Their souvenirs were vials filled with salt water from the Sea, and bottles of the fresh, but not very clear water from Jordan's stream.
ON THE BANK OF THE RIVER JORDAN.
"The only place where we were treated with disrespect during our trip was in Hebron," said one of a group around a table in the library. "There the natives were an ill-tempered set. They scowled as if resentful of our presence, and when we were driving away some hoodlums of the town threw chunks of mud and stone after our carriage."