evening. The weather was very hot, it had been many a day since Jack had

seen ice-cream, and so it was useless to talk of leaving the saloon till

it shut up.

In the morning the lost tribes of America came ashore and infested the

hotels and took possession of all the donkeys and other open barouches

that offered. They went in picturesque procession to the American

Consul's; to the great gardens; to Cleopatra's Needles; to Pompey's

Pillar; to the palace of the Viceroy of Egypt; to the Nile; to the superb

groves of date-palms. One of our most inveterate relic-hunters had his

hammer with him, and tried to break a fragment off the upright Needle and

could not do it; he tried the prostrate one and failed; he borrowed a

heavy sledge hammer from a mason and tried again. He tried Pompey's

Pillar, and this baffled him. Scattered all about the mighty monolith

were sphinxes of noble countenance, carved out of Egyptian granite as

hard as blue steel, and whose shapely features the wear of five thousand

years had failed to mark or mar. The relic-hunter battered at these

persistently, and sweated profusely over his work. He might as well have

attempted to deface the moon. They regarded him serenely with the

stately smile they had worn so long, and which seemed to say, "Peck away,

poor insect; we were not made to fear such as you; in ten-score dragging

ages we have seen more of your kind than there are sands at your feet:

have they left a blemish upon us?"

But I am forgetting the Jaffa Colonists. At Jaffa we had taken on board

some forty members of a very celebrated community. They were male and

698

The Innocents Abroad