gold around it in its youth-that has borne the kings of India to worship at ancient Meröe-that has murmured beneath the cradle of Moses, and foamed round the golden prow of Cleopatra's barge! Unhappy river! Thou, who, like Ixion, in thy warm youth hast loved the gorgeous clouds of Ethiopia, must thou now expiate thy raptures on the wheel? Yes, for thy old days of glory are gone by; thy veil of mystery is rent away, and with many another sacrificial victim of the ideal to the practical, thou must, forsooth, become useful, and respectable, and convey cockneys. They call thy steamy torturer the Lotus, too—adding insult to deep injury; for this, thy sacred flower, is begrimed with soot, and carries fifty tons of Newcastle coal in its calyx !

We were soon fizzing merrily up the stream; and after a night spent upon the hard boards in convulsive but vain attempts to sleep, we hurried on deck to see the sun shine over this renowned river. Must I confess it? We could see nothing but high banks of dark mud, or swamps of festering slime; even the dead buf. falo, that lay rotting on the river's edge, with a pretty sprinkling of goitrous-looking vultures, scarcely repaid one for leaving Europe. In some hours, however, we emerged* from the Rosetta branch, on which we had hitherto been boiling our way to the great river, and henceforth the prospect began to improve. Villages sheltered by graceful groups of palm-trees, mosques, santons' tombs, green plains, and at length the desert-the most imposing sight in the world, except the sea. The day passed slowly; the view had little variety; the wild fowl had ascertained the range of an English fowling-piece; the dinner was as cold as the climate would permit; the plates had no knives and forks, and an interesting-looking lady had a drum-stick between her teeth, as I pointed out to her the scene of the battle of the Pyramids which now rose upon our view. That sight restored us to good humor; we felt we were actually in Egypt; the bog of Allen, the canal-boat, the cockney steamer itself, failed to coun

* The Delta is seldom visited by travellers, who hurry over the less interesting objects on their arrival, and are pretty well tired of Egypt on their return. Nevertheless, many ruins, and some boar-shooting, will well repay the antiquary and the sportsman in their respective vocations.

teract the effect produced upon us by those man-made mountains, girt round with forests of palm-trees. As the sun and the champagne went down, our spirits rose: and, by the time the evening and the mist had rendered the country invisible, we had persuaded ourselves that Egypt was indeed the lovely land that Moore has so delightfully imagined in the pages of the "Epicurean."

CHAPTER VIII.

CAIRO ITS PORT-VIEW FROM WITHOUT-WITHIN THE CITADEL

While far as sight can reach, beneath as clear
And blue a heaven as ever blessed this sphere,
Gardens, and minarets, and glittering domes,
And high-built temples, fit to be the homes
Of mighty gods, and pyramids whose hour
Outlasts all time, above the waters tower.

MOORE.

MORNING found us anchored off Boulac, the port of Cairo. Toward the river it is faced by factories and storehouses: within, you find yourself in a labyrinth of brown narrow streets, that resemble rather rifts in some mud mountain, than anything with which architecture has had to do. Yet here and there the blankness of the walls is broken and varied by richly-worked lattices, and specimens of arabesque masonry. Gaudy bazaars strike the eye and relieve the gloom, and the picturesque population that swarms everywhere keeps the interest awake.

On emerging from the lanes of Boulac, Cairo, Grand Cairo ! opens on the view; and never yet did fancy flash upon the poet's eye a more superb illusion of power and beauty than the "city of Victory presents from a distance. The bold range of the Mokattam mountains is purpled by the rising sun, its craggy summits are cut clearly out against the glowing sky, it runs like a promontory into a sea of the richest verdure, here wavy with a breezy plantation of olives, there darkened with acacia groves. Just where the mountain sinks upon the plain, the citadel stands upon its last eminence, and widely spread beneath it lies the city, a forest of minarets with palm trees intermingled, and the domes

*"El Kahira," the Arabic epithet of this city, means "the Victorious;" whence our word Cairo: in Arabic "Misr."

of innumerable mosques rising, like enormous bubbles, over the sea of houses. Here and there, richly green gardens are islanded within that sea, and the whole is girt round with picturesque towers and ramparts, occasionally revealed through vistas of the wood of sycamores and fig-trees that surround it. It has been said that "God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain," but here they seem commingled with the happiest effect.

The approach to Cairo is a spacious avenue lined with the olive or the sycamore; here and there the white marble of a fountain gleams through the foliage, or a palm-tree waves its plumy head above the santon's tomb. Along this highway a masquerading-looking crowd is swarming towards the city; ladies wrapped closely in white veils, women of the lower class carrying water on their heads, and covered only with a long blue garment, that reveals, too plainly, an exquisite symmetry in the young, and a hideous deformity in the elders; there are camels perched upon by black slaves, magpied with white napkins round their head and loins; there are portly merchants, with turbans and long pipes, gravely smoking on their knowing-looking donkeys: here an Arab dashes through the crowd at full gallop, or a European, still more haughtily, shoves aside the pompous-looking, bearded throng. Water-carriers, calenders, Armenians, barbers, all the dramatis persona of the Arabian Nights, are there.

And now we reach the city wall, with its towers, as strong as mud can make them. It must not be supposed that this mud architecture is of the same nature as one associates with the word in Europe. No! overshadowed by palm-trees, and a crimson banner with its star and crescent waving from the battlements, and camels couched beneath its shade, and swarthy Egyptians, in gorgeous apparel, leaning against it, make a mud wall appear a very respectable fortification in this land of illusion.

And now we are within the city! Protean powers! what a change! A labyrinth of dark, filthy, intricate lanes and alleys, in which every smell and sight, from which the nose and eye revolt, meet one at every turn, and one is always turning. The stateliest streets are not above twelve feet wide; and as the upper

stories arch over them toward one another, only a narrow serpentine seam of blue sky appears between the toppling verandahs of the winding streets. Occasionally a string of camels, bristling with faggots of firewood, sweeps the streets effectually of their passengers; lean mangy dogs are continually running between your legs, which afford a tempting passage in this petticoated place; beggars in rags, quivering with vermin, are lying in every corner of the street; now a bridal, or a circumcising procession, squeezes along, with music that might madden a drummer; now the running footmen of some bey or pasha endeavor to jostle you towards the wall, unless they recognize you as an Englishman, one of that race whom they think the devil can't frighten, or teach manners to.

Notwithstanding all these annoyances, however, the streets of Cairo present a source of unceasing amusement and curiosity to the stranger. It has not so purely an oriental character as Damascus, but the intermixture of Europeans gives it a character of its own, and affords far wider scope for adventure than the secluded and solemn capital of Syria. The bazaars are very vivid and varied, and each is devoted to a peculiar class of commodities: thus you have the Turkish, the Persian, the Frank bazaars; the armorers', the weavers', the jewellers' quarters, These bazaars are, for the most part, covered in, and there is a cool and quiet gloom about them which is very refreshing; there is also an air of profound repose in the turbaned merchants as they sit cross-legged on their counters, embowered by the shawls and silks of India and Persia; they look as if they were for ever sitting for their portraits, and seldom move a muscle, unless it be to breathe a cloud of smoke from their bearded lips, or to turn their vivid eyes upon some expected customer-those eyes that seem to be the only living part of their countenance. These bazaars have each a ponderous chain hung across their entrance, to prevent the precipitate departure of any thief that may presume too far upon the listlessness of the shop-keeper: each lane and alley is also terminated by a door which is guarded at night. In passing along these narrow lanes, you might suppose yourself in a gallery or corridor, but that ever and anon you meet a file