The boat I obtained at Alexandria, was made like a keel boat. The cabin consisted of four bed rooms with a saloon in the centre. This cabin occupied the centre of the hull of the keel, but it left space outside all around, and more at each end than at the sides. The fourteen Arabs and one captain, called Reice, would either be pulling the boat all day, or managing the sail to advantage. When the breeze blew up the Nile, they would hoist the sail and take advantage of the wind. We paid them for the boat, men, and their own food, 250 pounds for the trip, but if the trip was not made in seventy days, and it is 800 miles, we then had to pay them so much for each day over, besides this, every few days the Reice would come into the cabin for bucksheesh; we were annoyed at every stopping place for bucksheesh. The Indian of North America would translate bucksheesh “gim E money.”

Our cookery was at the bow of the boat, a small space of four feet square, and our cook was an Italian of Rome. We paid him two dollars a day, because he was a European, and could not work for less, and by the way, Arabs cannot cook, and will not, for any price, cook such food as we had. Our best meat was smoked pork, and they detest this meat. Nearly every man on our boat was named Achmit, or Mahommed; but the Reice’s name was Marmound. The Reice was a good old man, I have often felt as if it would afford me great pleasure to sketch his profile, when, along about noonday, he would stop our boat without consulting us, to have his head shaved. The head shavers at all the little dirt villages, would keep a look out for boats, and be ready on the bank, to shave the captain’s head, and make one cent.

The speculators of the Nile could always be found on the banks at the villages, waiting to sell a goat, a chicken, or an egg. When we would stop a minute or two at a village, every few seconds, women or men would come in great haste to sell, each one trying to beat the other, some dates, cloves, or chickens. Some places, when the boat was shoving out, some great, fat and lazy Arab would come blowing and panting to the edge of the Nile with one single egg, that he had been waiting for the hen to lay. One man, to make up a dozen, squeezed an old hen until her egg bag emitted a yelk, which I refused to take as an egg. One Arab brought us some young crocodiles he had dug out of their nest, even while the old one was chasing him. To believe what an Arab says when trying to sell anything, would be a sublime display of the most profound ignorance a man could be guilty of. I have seen Arabs, ............