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FROM INDIA TO ARABIA. — ADETsT AXD THE ARABS. 271
It is about one hundred and fifty miles, if memory sei-ves
me, by railway from Suez to
Cairo, much of the way lying
across vast sand-plains, with only an occasional oasis. Let
us hasten. Here is a patch of palms : how drooping they
look ! There is a slowlj^-pacing caravan : how patient the
poor camels ! There are tenting Arabs ; there a lonely pelican
; there camels and donkeys browsing on a sort of sagebrush
; there a squad of Egyptian soldiers ; there a storm of
sand whirling across our track ; and here a mud-built village,
a very hive of squalid humanity. Around it cluster
dates, figs, plums, and flourishing vegetation, the results of
energy and irrigation. Many of the desert tracts of the
East may, by this and other methods, be reclaimed, and made
to blossom as the rose.
But see ! there are piles of old, moldering ruins ; there
crumbling walls, and prostrate pillars! What a field for
exploration ! How
sand-buried cities !
often ancient spirits have told us of
Surely, this was not once the picture of
desolation that it now is. Oh the sand, the scorching
sand ! On this August day the thermometer stands at 136 °
Fahrenheit. It is living at a poor " "
dying rate !
But we are on the way to the Nile. Wonder if this is the
route the patriarch Abraham took when going down to
Egypt to escape the famine ? And was it anywhere in this
locality that, returning from the " slaughter of the kings,"
he met Melchisedec, the king of peace, the baptized of
Christ ?
Worn and weary, this day's railway travel across sands
reminded me of the Arabian sheik's prayer. " An Arabi,"
says Saadi, "journeying across a vast desert, wearily
exclaimed, ' I pray that, before I die, this my desire may be
fulfilled : that, a river dashing its waves against my knecLs I
"
may fill my leathern sack with water !
'