Edwards, Amelia B.: A thousand miles up the Nile (New York, [1888])

46 A THOUSAND MILES UP THIS NILE.

Our style of dress, too, however convenient, is not exactly
in harmony with the surrounding scenery; and one cannot
but feel, as these draped and dusty pilgrims pass us on the
road, that we cut a sorroy figure with our hideous palm-
leaf hats, green veils, and white umbrellas.

But the must amazing and incongruous personage in our
whole procession <is unquestionably George. Now George
is an English north-country groom whom the M. B.'s
have brought out from the wilds of Lancashire, partly
because he is a good shot and may be useful to "Master
Alfred" after birds and crocodiles, and partly from a
well-founded belief in his general abilities. And George,
who is a fellow of infinite jest and infinite resource, takes
to eastern life as a duckling to the water. He picks up
Arabic as if it were his mother tongue. He skins birds
like a practiced taxidermist. He can even wash and iron
on occasion. He is, in short, groom, footman, house-maid,
laundry-maid, stroke-oar, gamekeeper and general factotum
all in one. And, besidos all this, he is gifted with a comic
gravity of countenance that no surprises and no disasters
can upset for a moment. To see this worthy anachronism
cantering along in his groom's coat and gaiters, livery-
buttons, spotted neckcloth, tall hat, and all the rest of it;
his long legs dangling within an inch of the ground on
either side of the most diminutive of donkeys; his double-
barreled fowling-piece under his arm, and that imper-
turbable look in his face, one would have sworn that he
and Egypt were friends of old, and that he had been
brought up on pyramids from his earliest childhood.

It is a long and shelterless ride from the palms to the
desert; but we come to the end of it at last, mounting just
such another sand-slope as that which leads up from the
Ghizeh road to the foot of the great pyramid. The edge
of the plateau here rises abruptly from the plain in one
long range of low perdendicular cliffs pierced with dark
mouths of rock-cut sepulchers, while the sand-slope by
which we are climbing pours down through a breach in the
rock, as an Alpine snow-drift flows through a mountain
gap from the ice-level above.

And now, having dismounted through compassion for
our unfortunate little donkeys, the first thing we observe
is the curious mixture of debris underfoot. At Ghizeh
one treads only sand and pebbles; but here at Sakkarah