And yet at breakfast and dinner I made one
of an assemblage of thirty or forty people. That I thought dull.
But as I stood one morning on the steps before the hotel, bethinking
myself that my throat was as well as ever I remembered it to be, I
was suddenly slapped on the back. Never in my life did I feel a
more pleasant sensation, or turn round with more unaffected delight
to return a friend's greeting. It was as though a cup of water had
been handed to me in the desert. I knew that a cargo of passengers
for Australia had reached Cairo that morning, and were to be passed
on to Suez as soon as the railway would take them, and did not
therefore expect that the greeting had come from any sojourner in
Egypt. I should perhaps have explained that the even tenor of our
life at the hotel was disturbed some four times a month by a flight
through Cairo of a flock of travellers, who like locusts eat up all
that there was eatable at the Inn for the day. They sat down at the
same tables with us, never mixing with us, having their separate
interests and hopes, and being often, as I thought, somewhat loud
and almost selfish in the expression of them. These flocks
consisted of passengers passing and repassing by the overland route
to and from India and Australia; and had I nothing else to tell, I
should delight to describe all that I watched of their habits and
manners--the outward bound being so different in their traits from
their brethren on their return.
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