Fire de Luxe

As they watched their flocks by night, certain Egyptian shepherds beheld, last week, a flaming portent. They saw the famed Luxor-Cairo de Luxe Express dash screeching through the night with two of its sleeping cars afire. For once the poor shepherds, shivering in their rags, were momentarily more fortunate than such de luxe travelers as George Eastman (kodaks). He, clad in silken green pajamas, slumbered in one of the flaming cars.

The fire had started when an ill-greased axle grew hot and hotter, began to spew forth sparks, and finally set the wooden sleeping car afire. Flames danced in the corridor, awakened the attendant. With a bound he leaped for the nearest stop-signal cord, found it already useless, burned through.

From the engine, three cars ahead, came a merry hoot, as the unsuspecting engineer blew his whistle at a crossing and the moon.

Mr. Eastman has a faithful, attendant physician, Dr. Albert D. Kaiser. His sharp ears caught the sound of a hasty knock as the sleeping car attendant dashed past his door. "I arose," said Dr. Kaiser afterward, "and found Eastman sleeping peacefully. ... I told him to fly. ... He grabbed for his clothes, but I shouted: 'Leave everything! Not a second to lose!'"

Some few hours later rich Mr. Eastman arrived at Cairo wearing one slipper, one shoe, a pair of dress trousers and the jacket of his green pajamas. He told how the train was finally stopped, when the sleeping car attendant managed to climb, catlike, over the swaying luggage van and into the cab of an engineer who knew his trade too well to look behind. Other passengers, all safe, were chiefly irate because their luggage had been destroyed when the two flaming coaches, which could not be extinguished, were uncoupled and allowed to burn to the rails.

Not thus irate was Mr. Eastman. He had shipped virtually all his baggage by another train, and had remained at Luxor for an extra day, to be shown over the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen by famed Egyptologist James Henry Breasted of the University of Chicago. With a contented smile, Mr. Eastman remarked that his unburned luggage contains a fine specimen of the nearly extinct white rhinoceros which he shot in the upper Nile region by special permission of the Egyptian Government.