ferred not to mention precisely what they most wish to know.

It is curious to find that the elder Egyptians had the Jewish and Mohammadan horror of swine. The swineherds were a separate race, like the headsmen of some modern lands, and married among themselves. Herodotus knows, as usual, why swine were abhorred, except on the festivals of the moon and of Bacchus, but as usual considers it more becoming not to mention the reason.

Is it not strange, as we sweep up the broad river, to see the figure of that genial, garrulous, old gossip, stalking vaguely through the dim morning twilight of history, plainly seeing what we can never know, audibly conversing with us of what he will, but ignoring what we wish, and answering no questions forever? One of the profoundest mysteries of the Egyptian belief, and in lesser degrees of all antique faiths, constantly and especially symbolized throughout Egypt, Herodotus evidently knew perfectly from his friendship with the priests, but perpetually his conscience dictates silence-Amen, O venerable Father.

I knew some bold Howadji who essayed a crocodile banquet. They were served with crocodile chops and steaks, and crocodile boiled, roasted, and stewed. They talked very cheerfully of it afterward; but each one privately confessed that the flesh tasted like abortive lobster, saturated with musk.

Hadji Hamed cooked no crocodile, and had no goldensleeved garment. He wore 'eree or cotton drawers, past

their prime, and evidently originally made for lesser legs. That first evening he fluttered about the deck in a long white robe, like a solemn-faced wag playing ghost in a churchyard. By day he looked like a bird of prey, with long legs and a hooked bill.

IV.

Che Ibis Sings.

WHILE the Hadji Hamed fluttered about the deck, and the commander served his kara kooseh, the crew gathered around the bow and sang.

The stillness of early evening had spelled the river, nor was the strangeness dissolved by that singing. The men crouched in a circle upon the deck, and the reis, or captain, thrummed the tarabuka, or Arab drum, made of a fish-skin stretched upon a gourd. Raising their hands, the crew clapped them above their heads, in perfect time, not ringingly, but with a dead dull thump of the palms— moving the whole arm to bring them together. They swung their heads from side to side, and one clanked a chain in unison. So did these people long before the Ibis nestled to this bank, long before there were Americans to listen.

For when Diana was divine, and thousands of men and women came floating down the Nile in barges to celebrate her festival, they sang and clapped, played the castanets and flute, stifling the voices of Arabian and Lybian echoes with a wild roar of revelry. They, too, sang a song that

came to them from an unknown antiquity, Linus, their first and only song, the dirge of the son of the first king of Egypt.

This might have been that dirge that the crew sang in a mournful minor. Suddenly one rose and led the song, in sharp jagged sounds, formless as lightning. "He fills me the glass full and gives me to drink," sang the leader, and the low measured chorus throbbed after him, "Hummeleager malooshee." The sounds were not a tune, but a kind of measured recitative. It went on constantly faster and faster, exciting them, as the Shakers excite themselves, until a tall gaunt Nubian rose in the moonlight and danced in the center of the circle, like a gay ghoul among his fellows.

The dancing was monotonous, like the singing, a simple jerking of the muscles. He shook his arms from the elbows like a Shaker, and raised himself alternately upon both feet. Often the leader repeated the song as a solo, then the voices died away, the ghoul crouched again, and the hollow throb of the tarabuka continued as an accompaniment to the distant singing of Nero's crew, that came in fitful gusts through the little grove of sharp slim masts—

"If you meet my sweetheart,
Give her my respects."

The melancholy monotony of this singing in unison, harmonized with the vague feelings of that first Nile night. The simplicity of the words became the perpetual child

ishness of the men, so that it was not ludicrous. It was clearly the music and words of a race just better than the brutes. If a poet could translate into sound the expression of a fine dog's face, or that of a meditative cow, the Howadji would fancy that he heard Nile music. For, after all, that placid and perfect animal expression would be melancholy humanity. And with the crew only the sound was sad; they smiled and grinned and shook their heads with intense satisfaction. The evening and the scene were like a chapter of Mungo Park. I heard the African mother sing to him as he lay sick upon her mats, and the world and history forgotten, those strange sad sounds drew me deep into the dumb mystery of Africa.

Of

But the musical Howadji will find a fearful void in his Eastern life. The Asiatic has no ear and no soul for music. Like other savages and children, he loves a noise and he plays on shrill pipes-on the tarabuka, on the tár or tambourine, and a sharp one-stringed fiddle, or rabáb. course in your first oriental days, you will decline no invitation, but you will grow gradually deaf to all entreaties of friends or dragomen to sally forth and hear music. You will remind him that you did not come to the East to go to Bedlam.

This want of music is not strange, for silence is natural to the East and the tropics. When, sitting quietly at home, in midsummer, sweeping ever sunward in the growing heats, we at length reach the tropics in the fixed fervor of a July noon, the day is rapt, the birds are still, the wind swoons, and the burning sun glares silence on the world.