Excerpt from The Gates of the East: A Winter in Egypt and Syria We had started for the Pyramids before eight o'clock in the morning. This was not, it must be owned, to get a view of them by sunrise, but to avoid being detained on the wrong side of the Nile, by the opening of the drawbridge which connects Cairo and the west bank of the river, until late in the afternoon. But though our early rising had no better motive than our convenience, it had its own abundant reward. It was early in December, and the country, as we rode on through the chill morning air, was covered by a dense mist which made any object at the distance of a hundred yards all but invisible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.