Iberia, in which both my voyages were performed, belonging to the lighter class of the Oriental Steam Navigation Company's ships. The Tagus is a fine powerful vessel, of nine hundred tons and three hundred horse-power, well kept, and a stout sea-boat. Nothing can surpass the politeness and attention of her officers; and the whole attendance has that air of thorough respectability which imparts so much confidence, and assures so much comfort, to the passengers—contrasting strikingly in the latter with the ragamuffianly crew which, on the Suez side, constitutes the servants in the government steamers. The Oriental Company give high pay to their servants, so as to make their service eminently desirable. They keep the establishment always fully employed; the heaviest punishment that can be inflicted on either seaman or servant is dismissal, with the assurance that he will never be employed by them again. The provisioning of the vessel is let out to a provider, who receives five shillings a-day for each passenger: the officers have nothing to do with it, but to see that everything is abundant and of the best.
We had a beautiful run of six days from Malta to Alexandria; our voyage bringing us within the farther limits of the Mediterranean, known as the Levant. The time occupied from Southampton to Alexandria was about twenty days, including stoppages.
Egypt. The land around Alexandria is so low, that it does not come
into sight till we are quite close to the harbor of Alexandria; but some
time previously, we observe rising, as it were, out of the sea, the windmills,
Pompey's Pillar, the Lighthouse, and Cleopatra's Needle, with several
towers and minarets. From the town westward to the Lake Mareotis,
for the space of nearly a mile, the sand hillocks by the shore are literally
covered with windmills. I counted about two hundred. The turrets are
about thirty feet high in all, the length of the arms about twenty feet,
breadth of sail three to three and a half feet. They have eight vanes
each; and as they are set different ways, and so move in opposite directions
in different mills, when tossing their arms in the wind, they look like
a set of sea-monsters sprawling about on the shore, and striving to regain
their native element. They are all employed in grinding wheat; and
though rugged and rude enough in appearance, are in reality simple and
efficient implements. They employ a single pair of stones, made either
of French bhurr or vesicular lava from Sicily. They have no sifting or
bolting apparatus: the ground wheat is received from the stones in a
sack, and the flower afterwards dressed through a fine gauze sieve by the
hand. I visited several of them, with a view to the introduction of a similar
species of machine into India.
On landing at Alexandria, the traveler now feels that he is fairly out of Europe. He may have seen a stray and stunted palm-tree or two at Gibraltar or Malta, with here and there a Turk or Arab in his native dress: these last, indeed, may be met with in the streets of London. At Alexandria all the costumes are. Oriental, European residents mostly dressing like Turks. Vast groves of magnificent date-trees, far surpassing in beauty those to be met with in Western India, stretch away in all directions. Long strings of camels are employed in carrying merchandise. The women are all veiled—covered over with that unsightly blue vestment which conceals the person and the face, leaving a pair of little holes for the eyes to peep through. Formerly it was the custom for passengers
