during the winter season, crowded to overflowing with hungry tourists. There are no places of interest to visit, and little to do besides sea-bathing in Lake Timsah, and donkey-riding along famous broad roads lined with sweet-smelling trees.

A fresh-water canal runs from Cairo to supply the waterworks, and the consequent mixture of fresh and salt water since 1869 is thought by the inhabitants to be responsible for the malarial fever for which Ismailia has of late years become unpleasantly noted in a country where malarial diseases are very rare.

There is a French hospital beautifully situated outside the town, and a French and a Greek doctor. The monuments now in the square at Ismailia, cut in Syene granite and diorite from Assouan, were brought from the ruins of Pithom, about twelve miles west of Ismailia. Pithom was apparently one of the garrison towns built by the Israelites for Rameses II. in the land of Goshen, and near it they encamped upon the second night of the Exodus, just as Lord Wolseley did in 1882 in the same district, now called Kassassin. The third night the fleeing Israelites halted close to Ismailia, and on the fifth day of their flight they are believed to have crossed the sea about halfway between Ismailia and Suez.

Ismailia is one of the cleanest and dullest towns

in Egypt, and was one of the healthiest until the boon of fresh water in great quantities after 1876 proved a curse by causing small swamps of water, which percolated through the desert sand from the new canals. The water-tanks in the gardens which used to supply the houses, and occasionally overflow, have been exchanged for a system of pipes and taps. Eucalyptus trees also have been planted, with a decided diminution of malaria.

SUEZ.

Suez is a town of 11,000 people, rather more English than either Port Said or Ismailia, and is of course the port of entry from India, Australia, and the far East. There is a comfortable hotel, an English doctor, and a railway line to Ismailia and Cairo, and a fresh-water canal supplying it from the Nile. Excursions may be made to the oasis called Moses' Well, to Ataka mountain, to the sea-coast to collect shells, or to Suakin.

Suez is in the same latitude as Cairo, and the Ataka range stretches across the desert to join Mokattam there.

Naturalists tell us that at Suez begins a genuine tropical sea, differing entirely in its inhabitants from the Mediterranean, only one day's journey

north of it. Hermit crabs and very many others of the crab family, bivalves and univalves, starshaped egg-urchins (Echinometra lucunter), crustaceans, sponges, and coral-fish, with many scores of others, can be found by exploring the coast and rocky pools.

By means of a boat on a clear day, a visit to the coral reefs may be made, though the best coral is at some distance from Suez. Dark brown and yellowish green coral in loose and brittle bits is based here on massive rocks of black mesh coral (Porites), and more rarely there may be found the cherry-red cup-star variety (Pocillopora)-not to be confounded with the ordinary red coral, which is not found here.

The strange and wonderful fishes can be best seen by going to the market, no less than five hundred and twenty kinds which haunt the coral slopes being known. One often offered for sale is the ball-fish (Tetredon), which has the power of blowing itself up like a balloon and floating on the water on its back; this, like the urchin-fish (Diodon), is protected like a hedgehog on land by spiny prickles, beside a beak something like a parrot's. They can bite well with their beaks, but are not poisonous. Small sharks are occasionally heard of, leaping and flying-fish, and the gay parrot and rainbow fishes are also known.

CHAPTER III.

CAIRO.

THE capital of Egypt and seat of government is six days by post from London, 2h. 5m. 9s. east of Greenwich, and in north latitude 30° 4′ 40′′.

Geology. Every one knows that the Delta is an

alluvial plain, literally the gift of the Nile, and that Cairo, succeeding to old Memphis, is at the apex of the Delta. The Mokattam hill of limestone rises about six hundred feet (above sea-level) behind the present town, and, as its fossils and nummulites show (Echinolampas Crameri, etc.), its age is that of the Eocene Tertiary, and its sides were washed by the Mediterranean waters in the days before the Delta was formed into a shallow bay with a sandy bottom. Near Mokattam is the Red Hill, 320 feet above the sea, of Miocene or Oligocene period, with sinter conglomerate containing silicified trees, probably deposited within the area of an inland lake. At Mokattam, towards the Red Hill, are purple and yellow sand and fine gravel, with a

C

little marl and clay and fragments of Terebratula, Ostrea, Pecten, and Balanus, all considerably later than the Eocene period, and tending to show that there was once another sea margin 220 feet above the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Near the Pyramids again are raised beaches, limestone pierced by Pholades and Ostrea undulata; and two miles south of the Sphinx are fossil sea-urchins (Clypeaster Egyptiacus), oyster-shells and pectens (? Post - Pliocene). The geological map shows alluvial deposit everywhere in the Delta and along the banks of the Nile, while to both east and west of this near Cairo is nummulite limestone, and to the north-east of Cairo are sandhills in the desert stretching down to the Suez Canal. The incomparably dry pure air of Cairo and Upper Egypt is due to this same nummulite limestone desert, which for miles and miles acts as a great lung of nature and purifies all the air which blows across it, while the extraordinary fertility of Lower Egypt is caused by the alluvial deposit. The absence of vegetation and of moisture in the desert has left its characters almost unaltered for ages, though there is abundant evidence of mountain torrents in prehistoric times and in the present day.

Lower Egypt consists geologically, therefore, of— (1) Nummulite limestone of the Eocene period, stretching southwards in the desert from Cairo