It is through this weird, dead country that the tourists smoke and gossip and flirt as they pass up to the Egyptian frontier.
The passengers of the _Korosko_ formed a merry party, for most of them had travelled up together from Cairo to Assouan, and even Anglo-Saxon ice thaws rapidly upon the Nile.

They were fortunate in being without the single disagreeable person who, in these small boats, is sufficient to mar the enjoyment of the whole party.

On a vessel which is little more than a large steam launch, the bore, the cynic, or the grumbler holds the company at his mercy.

But the _Korosko_ was free from anything of the kind.

Colonel Cochrane Cochrane was one of those officers whom the British Government, acting upon a large system of averages, declares at a certain age to be incapable of further service, and who demonstrate the worth of such a system by spending their declining years in exploring Morocco, or shooting lions in Somaliland.
He was a dark, straight, aquiline man, with a courteously deferential manner, but a steady, questioning eye; very neat in his dress and precise in his habits, a gentleman to the tips of his trim finger-nails.
In his Anglo-Saxon dislike to effusiveness he had cultivated a self-contained manner which was apt at first acquaintance to be repellent, and he seemed to those who really knew him to be at some pains to conceal the kind heart and human emotions which influenced his actions.