The P. and O.—The Bay—The Company—Gibraltar—An Orange
Tree—The Sieges—The Signal Station—Approaching Malta—The
Fear of Quarantine—What Quarantine is—Gozo and Malta from
the Sea—Valetta—Pratique—The Government—The Palace—A
Debate in Parliament—The Old Nobility—The Dome of Mosta—
How not to get from Malta to Naples—A Night between Scylla
and Charybdis.

CAPE ST. VINCENT.

IT is quite impossible to winter out of London—so
one thinks rebelliously, when the doctor's doom has
been pronounced. But there is no appeal—go you

must. When you have gone, when you have tasted
of the pleasures of a climate in which the air is not
damp, in which the sun is warm at Christmas, in
which you are strong and happy, able to breathe and
see, able to go about, to work and play, to learn and
teach, to take long walks and join pic-nics, all at a
season in which you would at home be confined to
one room, artificially heated and lighted: even the
charms of the village of St. Marylebone, near London,
cease to prey upon your memory.

Another thing which mitigates the terror of wintering
abroad is to find that people at home get on very
well without you. There are of course two sides to
this aspect of the subject. It is a little mortifying to
observe that the charitable or the learned society
which, as you thought, you were carrying on by your
own strivings with recalcitrant committees, and which
was prospering solely through your constant tact and
management, prospers even more swimmingly when
you are away. It is not altogether pleasant to hear
when you are abroad that one who, &c., is able to
enjoy an evening party or a run through the old
Masters at the Grosvenor, just as well with that silly
fellow Blank, who fortunately for him possesses the
art of making her laugh, as she ever did with you.
But after a time even these memories lose their poignancy,
and you reflect, perhaps wisely, that to breathe
her name you must retain the use of your lungs, and
that rheumatism will give you worse beatings of the

heart than she can ever cause, be she never so beautiful
or so cruel.

But apart from the question of health, I confess the
prospect of spending four or five months in Egypt had
no charms for me. True, I had read half a dozen
books about that ancient land, and, like everybody
else, had my own theory of the Exodus. I knew that
some pre-Adamite kings had heaped up cairns at a
place called Gheezeh, and that little boys in the streets
of Cairo were but scantily clad, and had eyes full of
flies. I was also acquainted with the use of the word
backsheesh, and had so far progressed in Oriental languages
that I knew it came, like khedive, from the
Persian, and that both words were looked upon as
disagreeable by people who love Egypt. Hieroglyphs,
too, like all the things “which no fellow can understand,”
had a certain fascination for me, but I was not
competent to distinguish between a determinative and
a cartouche.

Under these circumstances, it was with no lively
feelings that on a miserable morning in November,
1876, I commenced my first journey to Egypt—a
journey repeated every winter since. I drove to
Waterloo Station as the sun was going through
what must be called, for want of a fitter term,
sunrise. It only consisted, on this sad morning, in
making more visible the dinginess of closed shop-fronts
and deserted streets, followed by a rapid retirement
as the regular midday darkness set in. I

loved the fog: would that it had loved me in return.
What are the golden sands of Libya, or the crimson
peaks of Cush, to one who knows the mud of Regent
Street and the ruddy vapours of Hyde Park?

It does not take many hours to reach Southampton;
and the journey, once we were in the open country,
was not exactly unpleasant. I was rather curious to
make my first acquaintance with actual life on board
a great mail steamer.

The French say, with some truth, that Englishmen
can express about half their ideas by the use of two
words—namely, “fast” and “board.” To be on
board a fast mail steamer is an experience very
common with Englishmen; but the actual feelings
of those who travel in this way must vary in every
case, not only according to a man's mind, but according
to his stomach. To be lodged with some hundreds
of people in a great floating hotel, cut off from
all the disagreeable excitements of civilised life, the
postman's knock, the afternoon visitor, the telegram
—to be face to face with nature in one of its grandest
aspects, as we are constantly reminded by the sentimental
portion of our fellow-travellers—is to see life,
it might be thought, under very favourable conditions.

But the reality is not so sweet. As we float down
the Solent on a calm sea, a lovely view of the Isle of
Wight in front, the sun setting behind the trees of the
New Forest, and nothing to disturb the peaceful beauty
of the scene but the long and hideous redness of Netley

Hospital and the sound of the dinner-bell, we are likely
to anticipate more enjoyment than will really fall to
our share. The first interruption to our dream of
happiness is probably caused by seeing the visitors
leave by the little Southampton steamer. Husbands
parting from wives, parents from children, lovers from
lovers, are an interesting sight, but one which we do
not care to see twice. The comic aspects are so mixed
up with the tragic, the kisses with the tears, that the
indifferent looker-on is doubtful whether to laugh or
cry. Here is a man coming on board in a state of
semi-intoxication, not drunk enough to be happy,
and evidently struggling with the imperfect recollection
of some secret which he wishes to impart before
he and his friend are finally separated; or a father and
mother bidding their son farewell with the look of being
heartily glad to get rid of a prodigal, and the young
man weeping while even the mother's eyes are dry.
There may be a trace of repentance in his face, and
he has probably found life at home too pleasant to be
willingly given up. A bride with floods of tears, a
red nose, and redder eyes, parts from her sisters with
frantic embraces, her husband looking on helplessly
and but half pleased. But a great rush of steam, a
groan and a fizzle combined, and we are off; the little
steamer disappears in a cloud of waving handkerchiefs,
and those of us who have suffered no bereavement
are at leisure to observe with disappointment
that the prettiest face has departed, and that the

ladies who remain have almost all the appearance of
suffering from colds in the head. Such are my
first impressions.

Presently I begin to take stock of my surroundings.
The sleeping-cabin is very small for four. My large
portmanteau can only be crushed under the sofa, and
a surgical operation may be needful for its extraction.
The washing appliances seem very deficient. The
bed is very hard, and as narrow as a coffin. It
suddenly dawns on my memory that a favourite
cigar-case is at the bottom of the box under the
bed, and my mind is disturbed by the thought that,
of the companions of my cabin, one is sure to be
sick, and at least one to snore.

Before rough water is reached the dinner-bell rings,
and there is a contest, not altogether good-tempered,
as to a seat near the captain. By degrees, however,
settlements take place; those who cannot get near
the captain endeavour to sit opposite a pretty face, or
near the door, or where there is a chair, and so on,
until everybody is satisfied, or at least, seated. But
dinner is not a success. A pallor attacks my next
neighbour's countenance. In the middle of my best
anecdote he smiles at me vacantly for a moment, then
hardly pausing to mutter an excuse, he rises, and disappears
to return no more. One by one, about half
the guests at table leave it before the conclusion of
the banquet, and the survivor feels a sense of personal
injury when ominous sounds, as of a human being in

distress, reach him from the neighbouring cabin.
Perhaps his turn follows, perhaps he escapes; but,
next to being ill yourself, it is worst to witness the
sufferings of others, even if sympathy has no place
among your moral qualities; and your first evening
at sea closes in gloom. My own sufferings at sea
have always been slight, but the motion of the ship
causes qualms. For the first two days I have a
feeling of being subjected to indignity as the rolling
rudely shakes me from my seat, or takes my feet
from under me. There is something humiliating in
running down the deck and staggering up again as if
you were very drunk indeed. Of this first voyage
my chief recollection is that we had a gale in the Bay
of Biscay. I had long wished to see the great waves
of which I had heard so much, but it is a question
whether it is worth going through a gale to see them.
In other respects, for I must not attempt to describe
great waves, one voyage is much like another.

As the days pass, and calmer latitudes are reached,
the whole company of passengers meet again, and
various phases of sea-going character present themselves.
Some pace the deck in solitary meditation.
Some seat themselves in a shady corner and observe
what goes on around them with sleepy eyes. The
ladies lie back on the chairs with which the quarterdeck
is crowded, and make oft-repeated remarks on
the sea and sky. A smoking-tent has been rigged
up, and there the men assemble to talk as they take

tobacco, and give their opinions to the little world on
things in general. It is there that the universal
traveller holds forth, he who has surveyed the world
from China to Peru, and who has apparently brought
back only a knowledge of the iniquity of the British
Government, the discomfort of foreign hotels, the loss
of money by exchange, and the comparative venom
of different breeds of mosquitoes. You ask him if he
has been in Ceylon, or Norway, as the case may be,
and he tells you of the price of wine at Colombo, or
the bad tea they gave him at Christiana; or you ask
him about the latest revolution among the South
American States, and he replies with the remark that
all Portuguese settlers are rascals, and proves it by an
account of how a Spaniard cheated him about a horse.
If you inquire as to the customs of the Dyaks of
Borneo, he begins a series of criticisms on the steamboat
arrangements of Rajah Brooke. To him travelling
in itself is an end. He does not boast of the
lands and cities he has “done,” but talks as if doing
them had been an unmitigated annoyance to him.
He complains of the world because it is too easily
exhausted, and laments that there are so few regions
left to be traversed. He can tell you nothing about
any place he has visited, except how to get there and
how to get away again, and if you devote an evening
to cross-examining him in the hope of obtaining some
information, you are continually disappointed, and
find in the end that you have lost the time you might

have much more profitably devoted to reading a
geography book.

Beside him is a gentleman whose brogue, coupled
with his irregular use of will and shall, betrays
his origin, who informs you in five minutes of all
the particulars you care to hear of his birth, parentage,
and education, of his relationship to Lord
So-and-so, and the name of his wife's first husband.
He allows to having been born in Dublin, but
vows he never set foot in it since. If in return you
think to shame him by saying that you also are an
Irishman, he only tries to startle you by confessing
that he was convicted of Fenianism, and soothes you
again by an interminable anecdote, told to show you
that he was or is a man of property, and that in a
hand-to-hand fight he can lick all before him. He
knows every celebrated author in the three kingdoms,
despises most of them, and wonders how any one can
read their works, for he cannot. It is indeed soon
evident that in the last particular he tells the truth.
How far his other stories are to be believed you
cannot easily decide.

On the whole, however, he is a more agreeable
companion than the argumentative voyager, a man
who always takes the other side, whatever may
be your view, who invariably breaks down in the
main point of his argument, and seldom fails to
forget before he has done which was the side he
originally undertook to support. Then there is

the serious traveller, who makes it a business to go
abroad, who would not visit any country without an
object, who sighs deeply as he tells you he has to get
to Japan before the middle of January as it is his
duty, evidently a painful one, to investigate the history
and practice of Go Bang in its native country. You
cannot play chess with him because he knows every
gambit and opening, and tells you when you have
made three moves that he must checkmate you in
twenty-one or twenty-two more as the case may be.
He has also made whist a special study, and informs
you that when he lived in India he hired a pundit at
so much a month to play double dummy with him.

This man of serious purpose, who takes his pleasure
moult tristement, contrasts in my recollections
with the young lady who travels for no earthly
purpose or reason, who does not know whence she
is coming or where she expects to go: who begins
the Last Days of Pompeii on the first day of the
voyage, and is well into the second chapter by the
time she lands, under the impression that she will
be able to get up the Bay of Naples from its pages,
and so combine amusement with instruction. As
a rule, however, she does not read much, nor, though
she looks constantly at the sea, does she seem to see
much. She admires the coast of Portugal, thinks
Cintra very romantic, has never heard of the
Convention, and forgets whether it is Madrid or
Lisbon which lies at the mouth of the Tagus. On

the whole, unless that wistful gaze over the taffrail
betokens a pre-occupation which betrays itself on
calm days in excessive letter-writing, she affords
entertaining company to the traveller, and his mind
is not much wearied in any effort to direct the course
of a conversation with her.

I have always found children on board a great
resource, and am at times tempted in consequence
to imagine myself very amiable. Perhaps I am,
but they certainly amuse me better than their
elders, and keep up a constant excitement in my
mind, as I am always expecting one of them to
fall overboard. Perhaps the young soldiers going
to fight the battles of their country come next in
interest. The children are scarcely so simple as
the officers: for they lay little plots to capture a
good-natured passenger, lie in ambush for him in
the companion, ruin his repeater by constant striking,
and break his back by making a horse of him from
morning to night. The young heroes are less
troublesome, but less pleasing. They smoke incessantly,
perhaps in the vain hope of colouring their
scanty moustaches. They talk of their regiment
though they have never seen it, and are curious in
boot-jacks and cigarettes. They go to their destination
with a feeling that they may have to bleed in
their country's cause, which helps to ennoble them.
In moments of fancied seclusion—there is no real
seclusion on board—a photograph book is brought

out from the recesses of a portmanteau, and when
the boy's eyes are raised from his mother's or his
sister's likeness they are full of tears. He need
not feel ashamed of them though he wipes them
away so fast. It is to such young Englishmen that
England may have to look in time of need.

Such are the minor accessories of life on every
voyage. I remember that on this voyage in particular,
two brown gentlemen who had been aides-decamp
to the Prince of Wales during his Indian tour
were returning home. One of them was a Mahommetan:
the other a Hindoo. They used to play
a good deal of chess, and were much admired for
their personal beauty and gorgeous costumes. They
studied a complete letter-writer with great assiduity,
and brightened up very much when addressed in
Hindostanee.

We had also opportunities for studying the natural
history of the ship's stokers. They are indeed a
strange race, much blacker than anybody can paint
them—so black indeed that the coal-dust looks like
pearl powder on their faces. They sit, when not
at work, on the gratings near the funnel, and twang
the light banjo or sew long seams in grey shirtings.
There are many other blacks of various degrees of
darkness and obscurity, physical or social, on board
and I was much startled in the grey dawn of the
second morning to find one of them standing over
my lowly pillow with a drawn razor in his hand.

He had been told, it seems, that I wanted a shave,
and so I rose when I had sufficiently composed my
countenance, and putting on a dressing-gown followed
him to a big box near a porthole, where he set
me up like a model, and standing afar off at each
lurch of the vessel—for it was blowing a gale—made
a lunge at me, after a very moderate exhibition of
soap. Strange to say when my presence of mind
returned sufficiently to enable me to refuse any
further assaults of the kind, I found myself extremely
well shaved and perfectly smooth, my features no
more chiselled than when they were turned out
originally by mother nature.

The noise on board is incessant. First, there is
the throbbing of the engines. The beating of my
own rheumatic heart is nothing to them. Then there
are innumerable chains which are dragged through
holes, the holes all seeming to be just under my
pillow. Then at night there are uneasy spirits who
seem to start from every wave, and walk the deck
over our heads. In the early morning there is the
deck swabbing and the holy-stoning. Finally the
irony of fate is exemplified in the barrel-organ from
Saffron Hill which a grinning Italian grinds all the
evening. It seems as if the street music which has
contributed so much to your nervous breakdown in
London, had been specially commissioned by your
ghostly or literary enemy to follow you to sea. But
the organist is too sick to play for the first three

days, by which time the absence of postmen's knocks
and railway whistles has so far braced your nerves
that you can bear him with equanimity.

So passed the voyage. I omit the amazing anecdotes
I heard, and the pleasant chats I had with
acquaintances from the antipodes, the new world, the
dear knows where, and many other out-of-the-way
places. We rounded the ruddy cape of St. Vincent,
which looks as if its rocks were stained with the
blood of British seamen. We were shown afar off
the blue and brown headland of Trafalgar—the last
land which Nelson saw . And on the fourth morning
we perceived, as the mist cleared away, on the right,
the mysterious snow-clad mountains of Atlas; and
on the left Tarifa, the first landing-place of the
Moors in Spain, near the scene of Don Roderick's
disappearance in the lost battle.

Already, as we turn into Gibraltar Bay, we are in
a different climate. English ways, dresses, neatness,
soldiers, and advertisements are all about us as we
land; but the sky and the sea have a foreign look.
Yet it is hard to realise the fact that we are really on
a foreign soil. The rows of prickly pears, the aloes,
a shovel-hatted priest or two, only remind us of the
scenery of the Italian Opera. We pass through the
gateway known from Charles V.'s cognisance over the
arch as the Ragged Staff, and are at once in the town.
Except for the brilliant daylight there is nothing very
outlandish about it. Suddenly, in a shady lane of

the town, I glance up an archway, and immediately
I feel the reality of the difference. There, growing
twenty feet high in its native soil, with great green
leaves and golden fruit and white blossoms, is a
magnificent orange-tree.

The orange-tree behind the library at Gibraltar is,
to my mind, whether in itself or its surroundings, one
of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen.

It stands in a magnificent landscape. Towering up
nearly perpendicular behind it are fourteen hundred
feet of grey limestone, ragged and rough, but dazzling
in the sunshine to Northern eyes. The skyline
is sharply defined by the white saw -teeth against
the deep blue. Here and there a spot of dark green
vegetation affords a scanty browsing place to half-a-dozen
long-eared goats. Below, the purple waves
dance and sparkle, white-sailed feluccas cross the
bay, and the brown hills beyond look down upon
Algeciras—the Green Islands of the Moors. The
waters of the bay have swallowed all but one, now
no longer green, but white with fortifications and
bristling with guns, a standing menace to the English
fortress opposite. Some ninety years ago the anxious
eyes of Elliot and his little army were turned on the
Spanish preparations for the famous siege; they had
to watch in silence while their fiery trial was prepared
for them before their faces. Nearer we may recognise
the New Mole, on which, under Rooke, the
seamen of Hicks and Jumper landed in 1704; the

Lines, which bore the attack of the Spanish fireships
in 1780; the Old Mole, the Alameda, and all
the little piers and landing places which together go
to make up the port of Gibraltar. The red-tiled
roofs, the white walls, the many-coloured shutters of
the windows glow in the warm winter sunshine.

High up on the steep side of the bare rock, at the
angle which may be said to form the pass from the
mainland to the town, stands the Moorish castle, one
of the few fragments of antiquity which the place
contains. Where everything is in working repair,
fortifications and barracks, batteries and churches
alike, the ancient walls, zigzagging down the hill
from the tall square tower above to the old port
below, look strange and out of place, the sole surviving
witnesses besides the rock itself of the days
when Taric, the Persian freedman, led his Africans
into Spain. Some part of the buildings may date
from the time when the Moors colonised the barren
slope, bringing with them, no doubt, the apes from
Barbary and the orange-tree from the orchards of
Andalusia. Their dominion lasted for seven centuries
and a half where no Phœnician, Roman, or Goth had
thought it worth while to build so much as a fort.
It has been remarked that what one Roderick lost
another regained. Roderick the Goth forfeited life
and realm at the Guadalete in the eighth century,
and Roderick of Arcos took Gibraltar in the fifteenth
from Mohammed IX.

But, though Gibraltar may, strictly speaking, be
reckoned among the possessions of the last Gothic
King, there is no evidence that it had, ever been
inhabited before the coming of Taric ibn Zeyad. The
apes have dwindled to the little flock preserved, like
pheasants in England, by the keepers of the signal-station.
The castle, where it is not in ruin, has been
worked into the modern fortifications. But the “tree
is living yet,” and flourishes in many a hanging garden
of the little city, to Northern eyes, at least, among
the most beautiful of its adornments. The simple
harmony of natural colouring may be studied to advantage
among its well-laden branches, for the leaf
offers exactly the scientifically correct contrast to the
fruit. The brilliant tint of the orange is best set off
by the dark green of the foliage. It seems like destroying
the balance of a finely-painted picture to
pluck a single orange. When the leaves were still
young and pale, the fragrant white blossoms appeared.
Next, as the foliage assumed a deeper hue, the light
green fruit became visible. Then, as the leaves darkened,
as more and more of the blue of the sky was
absorbed, the yellow tone was transferred, until at
length the full glory of both leaves and fruit was
attained, and the cold harmony of spring became
the ripe contrast of autumn.

Though the orange-tree may be the most beautiful
thing in Gibraltar, there is no want of beauty and
interest in the scenery, circumscribed as it is, of the

famous Rock. The English visitor expects to see
a fortress. He finds a wild mountain, rich gardens,
a busy city, a summer sea, cliffs which rival Shakspeare's,
panoramas of folding hills, and a population
formed of the most picturesque constituents the
world affords. Dark-eyed Spanish ladies, with the
graceful mantilla round their proud heads, contrast
with the bustling English merchants' clerks. Soldiers
in the scarlet uniform of England march briskly
through the streets to the enlivening music of fife
and drum. Here and there may be seen the white
capote of the Arab lounging in a sunny corner, or
the crimson burnouse, the turban, the yellow slippers
of a people who, whatever they may have done in
the eighth century, certainly never hurry themselves
in the nineteenth. The seeker for antiquities may
be disappointed. He will see the arms and badges
of Charles V. over a gateway; may trace some
ancient masonry in the old sea wall, now masked
by a line of white limestone batteries, and may
observe that the Old Church, hideously modern as
it is, contains at one end some features of the Pointed
style of the fifteenth century. He may remark over
another gate the name of the Earl of Chatham.
That was William Pitt's elder brother—the dilatory
hero of the epigram—

The castle, indeed, is there, with its rough yellow
keep, its pointed arches, and the walls, with their
six towers, descending like steps, which once protected
the port. But even here he can find few
features of sufficient importance to be worth a nearer
inspection. He is driven to pass it by, wondering
how much of its remains date from the Moorish
conquest and how much from the time of Abdul
Mumen, who in 1160 fortified the town.

The view from above the castle is fine, but it is
well worth the walk to go up to the signal-station.
By rising early before the sun has come over the
Rock, we managed to have a cool pleasant walk.
After passing the castle, which stands at the extreme
northern end of the town, we went by roads cut
in the rock, past a guard-house and a magazine of
undoubtedly modern construction; and, after walking
a few yards, found ourselves already high above
the roofs and gardens. A short but steep ascent
brought us to one of the highest points of the Rock.
All along the path constant changes of view are
afforded. Looking back, the Castle forms a foreground
to the distant mountain, the first on Spanish
territory, and locally known as the Queen of Spain's
Chair. Beyond it, a little to the left, gleaming white
on a hill, is San Roque, whither the Spanish inhabitants
of Gibraltar removed when Sir George Rooke
took their town. It was impossible not to hazard
the guess that they called it after him as a

“sarcassum.” Just below is the beautiful Alameda,
and at one end the still more beautiful spot where
the victims of the great siege were buried. Among
the monuments and the cypresses stands, at the top
of a flight of steps, the green bronze bust of Elliot.
Perhaps this was the scene of a famous tragedy—

Full in front is the bay, rolling its blue waves up
to the foot of the rock. Beyond, on the western
shore, is Algeciras, a more ancient town than Gibraltar;
and not far from it, but invisible from the
Rock, are the remains of a Roman station. The
background is filled with mountains as far as the
eye can see; those in front dotted with limestone in
regular strata, those beyond marked here and there
with a white village, here and there topped by a tower.

As the signal-station is reached, a still finer view is
obtained. Looking due south along the axis of the

Rock, the height known as O'Hara's Folly, with its
ruined tower standing on the sharp ridge of limestone,
here bleached into marble whiteness, offers a strong
contrast to the blue sea on either hand, the blue mountains
across the Strait beyond, and the sky, bluer
than all, above. I felt a thrill as I gazed into Africa,
so to speak, over those mysterious mountains. They
rise precipitously from the water, the highest being
the ancient Abyla, the “Mountain of God,” according
to the Phœnicians. The Saracens called it after
Musa, as they called Calpe after his lieutenant,
Tarik; and the modern English soldier, outdoing
even the Moor in his want of sentiment, has given
it the familiar name of the Ape's Hill. Below, but
hardly visible, is Ceuta, the Spanish convict settlement
of which so shocking an account appeared
recently in the English papers. The seven hills
which gave it the ancient name Sebta, from which
the modern Ceuta is corrupted, cannot be made out;
but we could hardly help contrasting the horrors
which go on, so to speak, under our very eyes
across the Strait, with the orderly, if stern, rule of
the “state of siege” in Gibraltar.

Turning to the eastward, we looked over a parapet
fourteen hundred feet down into the Mediterranean.
Steep as is the giddy height, it is still steeper a little
further north, where a long sloping bank of loose sand
extends almost from the very summit to the sea below,
and cuts off the communication from north to south

upon that side. The coast-line eastward curves
gradually towards Malaga and the snowy Sierra,
ranges of mountains appearing and disappearing in
the blue distance as the sunlight comes and goes.
Just below the signal-station may be seen, nestling
at the foot of the cliff, the summer residence of the
Governor, where two summers ago the children were
startled from their games by the apparition of a
dozen tailless “monkeys” which the dry weather
had driven from their fastnesses in the rocks above.
North of the slope of sand is Catalan Bay, a colony
it is said, of Genoese fishermen. They are cut off
from all communication with the outer world, except
by sea or when a dry season allows them to make
a path along the shifting sands.

Bleak and rugged as is the view, the sunshine, the
colouring, the glowing purple of sea and sky impart
a beauty which enabled me to understand, if I had
not done so before, why people talk as they do of
the Mediterranean and its supremacy among inland
seas. We turned reluctantly as the signalmen announced
the approach of an ironclad from the West,
or ran up the ball which tells of the coming of the
mail from England. A distant bugle-call catches
the ear, and we look down to the parade-ground,
a thousand feet below, where we see the soldiers
moving as on a chess-board, or watch the artillery
practice from one of the forts at the water's edge.
The ledge of earth on which the town stands is interrupted

by the public gardens, which include the
parade-ground; high above them, but far below the
station, a few villas are perched among stone-pines
and vine-clad terraces, wherever there is standing-room
for a house. The cultivation of the Rock
contrasts strongly with the desolate bareness of the
Spanish coast across the bay. The English energy
which has held Gibraltar against such fearful odds
has also made it into a garden. The roadway above
the Alameda might have been transplanted bodily
from Surrey, if it were not for the prickly pears
and the aloes here and there. There are English
yachts in the bay; English steamers come and
go; English carriages drive along the street as if
it were Piccadilly, and as the parade breaks up, the
troops march to their barracks to the sound of
“Obadiah” and “Tommy, make room.”

I stayed one week only on my first visit to
Gibraltar, and should have gladly stayed longer
but that one of the dreaded “levanters” broke over
the Rock, and the damp became unbearable. When
a levanter blows, the rain comes down from the steep
cliff in a cascade, and though carefully drained, the
town becomes so damp in a few hours that you are
in a steam bath.

The voyage to Malta commenced in the dark,
and it was not till another year that I enjoyed the
beautiful views of the African and Spanish coasts
which are afforded from within the Straits in

daylight. We took our passage in the weekly Peninsula
and Oriental steamer; and once out of the
reach of the “levanter,” spent a few very pleasant
days. Then came a cloud.

The inexperienced traveller is sometimes puzzled
by his fellow-voyagers' anxiety about pratique. He
does not fully understand their dread of quarantine,
and has no idea of the penalties incurred by a “foul
bill.” Yet these terms belong to usages which may

COAST OF ALGIERS.

cause him the greatest inconvenience, usages against
which the best viséd passport and the warmest letters
of introduction cannot protect him. Precautions
against epidemics of a kind which may be described
as superstitious and traditional rather than scientific
or efficacious have been devised at every port, and the
unfortunate tourist has no escape. Quarantine may
mean for him the full forty days of abstinence from
the joys of society or he may get off with a less

protracted period; but he who has once undergone
even the shortest probation in a Lazaretto will ever
after fear to incur it.

Now, Malta is a place full of interest for many different
kinds of travellers. Soldiers may want to see
the forts, artists to sketch the up and down stairs
streets. The ordinary tourist even may have many
things to see in the three little islands which form the
group. He has read St. Paul and Josephus, and
would visit the scene of the wreck of “a certain ship
of Alexandria.” He may have an interest in the
history of orders of chivalry, and desire to examine
St. Elmo, and fight over on the spot the famous siege
of 1565. He has studied architecture, and would verify
Mr. Fergusson's account of the wonderful dome of
Mosta. If he is a botanist, he may propose to judge
for himself as to the genus of a so-called Centaurea,
about which Linneans are in doubt. The language
of the natives has not yet been successfully reduced
to writing. The statistical problems offered by the
thickly-populated islets are but half worked out
There are, in short, few places of the same size in
Europe—for the Maltese reckon themselves Europeans
—in which so many objects of interest, social, political,
geological, geographical, or only picturesque, may be
found; and the traveller easily makes up his mind
to land, and, after seeing something of Valetta and
its environs, to go on by the next steamer. He may
be sorry to leave pleasant company on board, but

pleasant company may be encountered again, and
there is but one Malta. There may be even a melancholy
pleasure in persuading himself that bright eyes
are a little dimmed as he announces his heroic intention.
He is not altogether displeased to find
that he will be missed, and his own sorrow is much
mitigated by the regrets he hears expressed at the
prospect of parting.

Should this, then, be your case, the accounts you
hear of the quarantine and the danger of being
trapped there are not pleasant. Before we sighted Gozo
a discouraging rumour spread among the passengers.
It was told at first as a profound secret; but many
hours had not elapsed before everybody knew it.
Small-pox was on board. A sailor had developed
the disease in a mild form, and before it was recognised
he was almost well. We all felt sorry, in a
modified way, for the poor man, and wondered why
he had not been properly vaccinated; but there we
should probably have ceased to think of the matter,
only for the look of our more experienced friends.
They were not afraid of infection, but they were
afraid of quarantine.

After much debate, a deputation waited on the
captain to ascertain the truth. Every member of it wore
the longest face possible as they emerged again from
the deck cabin. A “clean bill” is hopeless at Malta:
passengers landing will almost certainly be detained
in quarantine: there is just a chance that, as the case

is of the slightest, and as the disease has not spread,
pratique may be granted after a little delay: smallpox
is not cholera, nor even measles. Such were the
captain's words. But the chance is very slender, and
those who proposed to land must make up their minds
to the worst. They must prepare to undergo all
the mystic and inconvenient ceremonial annexed to
going ashore from an infected vessel. How many
days, we inquired anxiously, will seclusion be enforced?
The answer makes our hearts sink. Not
more than twenty-one; yet we had not intended to
stay more than seven. Three weeks in a quarantine
hospital! the prospect is sufficient to appal the
stoutest heart. Would it not be better to go on to
the next port? The “case” will be landed. The
quarantine at Alexandria or Suez will be shorter, if
there is any. And then we shall not have to part
quite so soon from our new friends.

There were several of us in this situation, and it
was easy to see that the prospect of going on was not
wholly disagreeable to a gentleman or two on one
side and a lady or two on the other. Even with a
mild and isolated case of small-pox on board, lovemaking
went on briskly under the favouring rays of
a full moon. Their minds, poor things, were evidently
torn between contending emotions. Eventually they
decided that it would be foolish to pack up with such
a prospect: and so I believe their young hearts were
not sundered till the ship reached Suez.

Meanwhile I confess to having had a great feeling
of curiosity as to quarantine. The love of knowledge
impelled me to seek the curious experience. I had
never met anybody who had undergone it. I was not
unwilling to see what it was like. Is there a prison—
a kind of combination of the old sponging-house and
a sanitarium? And where is it situated? Do the wild
waves beat upon a sea-girt rock? or is it perched upon
a lofty peak whence the islands may be surveyed at
leisure, and twenty-one sunsets admired? Perhaps
it would be as well, after all, to submit to fate. I
might take the opportunity of mastering Mr. Browning's
latest poem, or that charming treatise on pre-historic
culture, or the wave theory in musical tone,
which I have so long intended to study. One might
write in the enforced solitude a work which will immortalise
him. Another might, if there is a piano in
quarantine, practise that difficult passage of Bach,
and astonish his musical friends on his return. Another
might paint a whole picture in three weeks and
have it ready for the next Academy. Thus I reflected
taking one side of the question first. But the other
side was not to be neglected. Here were merry companions,
a comfortable cabin, fine weather promising
to hold out, a good ship, and, above all, no trouble
of packing and disembarking only to pack up and
embark again. I was still undecided as Malta came
in sight, and I went on deck to see the view.

The three islands do not look very attractive from

the sea. Gozo is the most westerly; and after the
blue haze has turned to brown, and the bare rocks
and parched hills are clearly seen, there is little to
make one wish to land upon it. There is a narrow
green strait, over which something like a castle
seems to keep guard, and then Comino gradually
develops itself, a mere islet, and almost featureless.
Beyond it is the so-called Bay of St. Paul. Malta
itself is now alongside, and soon the white fortifications
of Valetta begin to appear over the hill-top.
In the valley is the dome of Mosta, looking very
like a haystack from a distance. The shore is dotted
with villas, and the mouth of the harbour has the
appearance of a second-rate watering-place in
England. Not a tree is in sight, and everything is
either white oolite stone or brown sunburnt moor.
Valetta itself is well situated on a peninsula of the
limestone which divides the harbour into two parts.
The town stands very high, and, as it faces north,
looks higher and shadier than it is against the
glowing southern sky. As the steamer enters two
deep bays present themselves, and the three great
forts, one on either side and one on the promontory
between, look very impressive in their strength. The
eastern harbour is the chief naval port; but the
steamer, keeping to the right, enters the western,
passing close to an island which lies within the
harbour, and still bears its old Arabic designation of
“Jezirah.” Two buildings only are upon it. Fort

Manoel was built in 1726, and forms part of the
system of defences, looking to seaward; the Lazaretto
is behind the fort, and looks the other way—a
long low building, at the sight of which, and the
prospect of passing three weeks or a month within its
dingy walls, my heart sank. Turning away, I caught
sight of a yellow flag at the mast head of the steamer.

Those wise passengers who had decided not to
land had a great advantage in the calmness with
which they could look on. The scene, was very
unlike what would be presented by an English seaport.
There was stir and bustle enough, but it did
not wear the aspect of business. Numberless green
boats, with prows like gondolas, are being rowed
round the steamer at a short distance by sailors who
stand and row forward. There are great black coal
barges, orange boats, flower boats, pleasure boats, all
putting off from the “Marsamuscetto Gate” at the
foot of a steep street of steps. The rocky promontory
on which Valetta stands is full in view, and you may
observe that it is divided transversely by a deep
ravine, down the sides of which are other long
flights of steps, as well as to the water-side. Along
the dorsal ridge, the axis of the peninsula, is the chief
line of street, and all the others run parallel or at
right angles; for Valetta is no ancient and irregular
town, but was all built upon a settled plan after the
repulse of the Turks from St. Elmo. La Valette laid
the first stone in 1566, and in 1571 the city was

completed. From the water's level it still looks new,
and this look is increased by the number of villas
which on all sides fringe the shores of the Quarantine
Harbour—Sliema, the principal suburb at that side,
being just so near that you can see the carriages
coming and going along the dusty road.

While the officer of health is coming we may
glance at a local guide-book which gives us particulars
of the quarantine regulations. Here are
some pleasing extracts:—

“In regard to food, should the person not possess
the means of ordering a breakfast and dinner at the
high rate charged by the Trattoria connected with
the Lazaretto, he stands a good chance of suffering
from hunger.” Nor does the cheerful prospect thus
held out improve when we read on:—” As the
Guardiano placed over you is not allowed to serve
in any way (though you are obliged to pay him a
salary, besides supplying him with food), one must
almost necessarily hire a servant, who may charge as
much as 2s. 3d. per day.” Your ideas as to the
pleasant leisure of a life in quarantine fade insensibly
as you proceed. In case the traveller “wishes to
hire furniture over and above that provided by the
Government, consisting of a table, two chairs, and two
bed-boards and trestles, he may do so from a person
privileged for the purpose, who at a pretty high rate
will supply him with anything he may require.”

Such are some of the quarantine regulations in

what may be considered a civilised country. What
must they be in Turkey or in Spain? Three weeks
at Suez would probably make Jezirah seem a little
paradise by contrast. For no fault of your own,
unless it is a fault to travel, you may be imprisoned
and very heavily fined, at the option of an official
who probably does not know the difference between
endemic and epidemic, or typhus and typhoid.
Apart from actual experience you might suppose
that, if a community like that of Malta thinks
quarantine needful, it would at least take care that
the unfortunate traveller who suffers for its sake
should not suffer at the expense of his own pocket,
since it is not for his own good. If he is not actually
recompensed for his imprisonment, at least care will
be taken that he has nothing to pay. But unless our
Guide is strangely misinformed, he has to pay, and to
pay heavily too, for the privilege of undergoing
quarantine. His bill at a Brighton hotel in the
height of the season would probably about equal that
incurred at the Lazaretto on Jezirah. One might at
least have expected that the custodian placed over
him would be paid by the Government, that his
rations would be supplied at cost price, and that a
soldier from the Hospital Corps would be told off to
wait on him. I do not go at all into the question
of the efficacy of these or any other quarantine
rules. If people who have the right to make such
rules choose to do so, it is no concern of mine.

As we survey the unfortunate passengers who are
obliged to land, we feel that the present working of
those rules at Malta is needlessly severe, and indeed
disgraceful to the executive of a British dependency.
Here is a timid little governess without a friend;
how is she to support three weeks' quarantine? She
has been months scraping up her passage-money. In
the words of the Guide, she stands a good chance of
suffering from hunger. There is a second-class
passenger with a wife and two children. He has
made up a little purse to keep the family going till
he gets work. It will suffice them for about a week.
And of a different character, but deserving also of
sympathy, are the other cases—the anxious wife,
who descries her husband afar off in one of the
boats, which still keep out of reach; or the midshipman
about to join his ship; or the young
tourist of rank who is going to stay a week with
the Governor.

As we endeavour by condoling with these unfortunates
to make the best of our own case, the
officer of health appears. He is a pompous-looking
man in uniform, and is rowed out from the gate
under an awning. The anxious passengers augur
well or ill from the expression of his face as he nears
the steamer. The surgeon stands to meet him at the
foot of the ladder and hands him the fatal bill. He
receives it with a pair of tongs, at which there is a
laugh and a cheer, and puts it into a box full of

holes, which he places over a little brazier to be
fumigated. There are a few moments of intense
anxiety as he pushes off and reads the paper at
a safe distance. Some of the passengers endeavour
to keep up the spirits of the others, but with slight
success. The captain speaks hopefully of pratique,
and his words are eagerly received and commented
upon. At last the officer of health returns. He
speaks for a minute with the surgeon, who mounts
the ladder and speaks to the captain. The captain
descends; five minutes pass. Some of the ladies are
in tears; the men look pale. The captain suddenly
comes up again with a smiling face. “You must all
be fumigated,” he says, “and then you can go
ashore; he grants us pratique.”

Thus happily ended a scare. There is enough to
see at Malta to make a fortnight pass very rapidly.

Few countries have undergone so many changes of
rulers. Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans,
Goths, and Arabs, all held it in turn before the close
of the ninth century of our era. Since Roger the
Norman in 1090 drove out the Moslems the series of
Christian dynasties has included German emperors,
Aragonese kings, French princes, and Spanish dons.
History records few stranger transactions than that
by which in 1350 the islanders freed themselves from
the grasp of Don Gonsalvo Monroi, to whom they
had been pledged by King Martin of Sicily for
30,000 florins; but not even by buying their own

freedom and taking themselves out of pawn did they
secure independence; and when in 1530 the Knights
of Rhodes were seeking a new habitation, Malta was
given up to them by Charles V. at the peppercorn
rent of a falcon to the King or the Viceroy of Sicily.
For the first time in their existence, perhaps, the
Maltese enjoyed the blessings of home rule under
the sovereignty of the Grand Master, but we have no
reason to suppose that they were satisfied with what
was only a tyranny tempered by the Inquisition.
Even Roger the Norman had respected the conscientious
scruples of such Mohammedans as remained
after his conquest; but the order of St. John
enforced the strictest orthodoxy, and before the
French expelled the Knights and the Inquisition
with them, Malta had become what she is still, more
completely Romish than Rome itself. Even the Grand
Master fell completely under the terrible rule of the
Dominicans, and a window is pointed out at a street
corner close to St. John's Church, where executions
took place, in sight of the crowd assembled in the
adjacent square.

The French abolished the Inquisition as well as
the Knights, but with that strangely short-sighted
policy which has made them hated wherever they
have come, in Egypt, in Syria, in Germany, as in
Malta, they plundered the unhappy people and their
churches to an incredible extent. I was shown
curious-old silver treasures at Citta Vecchia in the

cathedral, and heard wonderful stories of how they
were preserved during the French occupation.

The English are not, however, very popular: but
the example of the unhappy Corfuegians may well
be held up to the Maltese. The Ionian islanders
were constantly petitioning to be given up to Greece.
Now that they have attained their wish, and the
prosperity which Englishmen and money brought to
the island have disappeared together, they lament
their hard case, and abuse us for our selfishness in
turning them off.

It will be the same with the Maltese if we ever,
during the reign of some future Gladstone, take it
into our heads to hand the island over to Italy.
There is, I believe, an Italian party in Malta. Their
objects are about as definite as those of Home Rulers
in our own Parliament.

The experiment, first tried in 1849, of calling
together a local legislative body, would be more
interesting from a political point of view if free discussion
involved equal freedom in decision. But the
members of the Government are always ranged on
one side and the elected members of the Assembly
on the other, and the Government, having a majority
of votes, can always carry its measures. It may be
questioned whether the existence of a permanent
Opposition is to be attributed to the impotence of
the local vote, or whether it is not rather to be
accounted for by the religious and social condition

of the native electors. When education has reached
the lowest classes we may hope for clearer political
views among them; meanwhile it is curious to notice
that, though all educated Maltese talk Italian, many
French, and most English, yet not one of these languages
is the vernacular. A dialect of Arabic—till
within the last few years unwritten and unstudied—
prevails among the whole population, and is preferred
for conversation by the members of every private
family. Thus far, indeed, its existence has been
ignored by the successive rulers of Malta; but not
the less it exists, and the traveller on his way
homeward from the East is surprised to find himself
understood when he uses words picked up in the
bazaars of Cairo or Damascus.

The debates of the local Parliament are carried
on, however, either in Italian or English; and the
stranger present at a sitting has often the gratification
of hearing Southern eloquence in his own
Northern tongue, and of listening to English spoken
with a grammatical correctness and a distinctness
of utterance which he might miss in the House of
Commons at home. Some members of the Council,
however, refuse to speak in English; it is not
easy to see on what grounds, for English is not more
foreign to the native Arabic than Italian. In the
judicial tribunals and the schools Italian only is employed;
but difficulties constantly occur, and many
other questions turn upon this one of language. In

education particularly, the necessity, hitherto deemed
insuperable, of teaching Italian rather than Maltese
has had a retarding effect on the growth of the young
idea. With the help of great natural abilities, many
of the islanders have succeeded in obtaining prominent
places in politics, commerce, and the arts; but
it is confessed by all Maltese of enlightenment that
the bulk of the population is sunk in a condition
of almost hopeless ignorance. It might have been
supposed that, with Arabic for a foundation, and with
Italian and English as early acquisitions, the young
Maltese would have been turned to account in our
administration of more distant and more purely
Oriental countries; but I never heard that a single
native of these islands has entered the Civil Service
in India, although scores, perhaps hundreds, are interpreters
in English consulates and mercantile offices
throughout the Levant, and every second courier or
dragoman is a Maltese.

The “Council of Government,” as it is called,
assembles daily between November and June, in the
Governor's palace at Valetta. It is composed of
eighteen members, of whom ten are appointed by the
Crown, being the holders of such offices as that of
Crown Advocate, Collector of Customs, or Treasurer,
and including the Governor himself, who is thus at
once Sovereign, Speaker, and Prime Minister. All
the Government offices are open to natives, except
those of Chief Secretary and of Auditor; and of the

nine members of the Council now sitting on the
official side, only two others besides the general
commanding are English. On the opposite side all
the elected members are natives. They include one
Roman Catholic priest, two ecclesiastics only being
allowed to sit at the same time, together with three
lawyers, and several members of the old Maltese
nobility.

I attended a sitting of this miniature Parliament.
It is held in the palace, a building situated on
the brow of the noble peninsula which Valetta
crowns. Built in 1571 by Peter del Monte, Grand
Master, it contains, like so many houses in the same
city, a series of fine apartments, designed rather for
coolness in summer than comfort in winter. They
are decorated in the “rococo” fashion, which prevailed
after the first blush of the Renascence had
passed away, and before classical architecture was
affected. Two fine, but hardly picturesque, courtyards
are surrounded by a series of corridors and
galleries which contain not only pictures and portraits
of Grand Masters and other potentates, but a
magnificent collection of ancient arms and armour,
in many respects almost worthy to rival that in the
Tower of London, and comprising nearly a hundred
suits of complete mail. From the corner of the
principal court a magnificent marble staircase of
ingenious design, winding at an easy slope; conducts
the stranger to one of these galleries. Half way up,

in a recess, his feelings of awe at the august presence
of viceroyalty are quickened by the sight of the
books in which visitors to “their Excellencies” record
their names. At the top he finds himself at once
near a tall mahogany door, where an imposing
official, accompanied by soldiers, messengers, and
the other attendants appropriate to a Court, gives
him admission after certain formalities and a caution
as to breaking silence. The Council sits in the
Tapestry Hall, a chamber some sixty feet long and,
perhaps, not less than thirty-five in height. The
walls bear the Gobelin hangings which give a name
to the chamber. They are of good design and in
brilliant preservation, though a hundred and fifty
years have passed since they left the loom. The eye
seeks in vain for signs of the English domination.
The roof is supported by cross beams carved and
gilt, as well as the panels between; but the patterns
employed are without political significance. Above
the tapestry and below the cornice there is a zone
filled with emblems more or less warlike—shields,
cuirasses, and trophies of arms—but they allude only
to the extinct glories of the order of St. John, and
are completed at the further end of the room, where
we should look for the Queen's arms, by a vast
crucifix, standing out with startling distinctness just
above the throne of the Governor. Even the carpet,
where one might expect Axminster or Glasgow, is
apparently contemporary with the tapestry, and

bears the golden fleur de lis of old France. The
most English feature in the room is a set of desks
for the deputies, of new varnished yellow oak, which
must at some not very remote period have left their
native Tottenham Court Road.

On the right of the spectator sit the Ministers.
On the left—that is, on the Governor's right—are the
elected members. The Governor himself is supported
behind by two gentlemen in gorgeous uniforms,
and fortified in front by two secretaries. He is in
plain clothes, but wears the diamond star of some
exalted order on his breast. Dignified as is his
position, nevertheless he is not to be envied. He is
set on high to be spoken against, like Naboth the
Jezreelite; and it almost made my hair stand on end
to hear the whole character of the Government, including
its august head, called in question in a torrent
of warm eloquence. The orator sat on the Opposition
side. His appearance was foreign, but his
English was excellent, and neither the heat of passion
nor the alien tongue disguised the rich tones of his
Southern voice. As he proceeded, the subject under
discussion was gradually unfolded. The old question
of language was at the bottom of it. Somebody
had made a deposition in a Maltese court of law.
The case had gone on appeal to the Home Government,
and the deposition had been translated by an
official whom the speaker did not hesitate to denounce
as having given certain sentences or certain words

a turn such as materially to alter their meaning. I
was carried away in spite of myself while he spoke.
His manner was as good as his voice. An air of
injured innocence was followed by an outburst of
generous indignation, and that again by an appeal to
the eternal principles of right and justice. Only a
person accustomed to such a power of words could
see that the honourable gentleman had no case; and
that all these flowers of rhetoric and refinements of
action were only employed to cover the nakedness of
the argument.

It was with feelings by no means favourable to
my own countrymen that I saw a member of the
Government rise to reply. His voice was somewhat
low. The words did not come rapidly. There
was a total absence of gesticulation. But in an
instant the whole edifice of the previous speech
toppled over, as it were, and disappeared. After all,
I could not but reflect, English common sense is
better than any amount of southern eloquence. The
speaker had evidently the judicial faculty born in him,
as in all Englishmen, and was not to be disturbed
from his English centre by the most fervid declamation
to be found in Malta. As I went out I felt satisfied
that it is well these people should be ruled by
an English majority, and with a laudable patriotic
pride I asked of the doorkeeper the name of the
Minister.

“That,” he replied, “is a Maltese gentleman from

a village at the other side of the island. He is called
Sir Adrian Dingli.”

The old Maltese families are rather proud of their
titles of nobility, and at the time of the Prince of
Wales's visit there was some offence given because
they were not duly recognised at the Vice-regal
Court. Since then a Commission was appointed to
go into the claims, and the Blue-Book which was
issued gives some strange particulars on a subject
which interested me very much during my stay.

There are marquises, counts, and barons in the
Commissioners' list, but they are all to rank among
themselves according to the seniority of their titles;
and Madame Damico, “Baronessa di Diar el Bniet e
di Bucana,” whose barony dates from 1350, will rank
before Dr. Delicata, to whom the Commissioners have
confirmed the title of Marquis of Ghain Kajet, conferred
by the Grand Master de Rohan in 1796.

The task before the Commissioners was one of
great difficulty, and their report is not altogether
satisfactory from an English point of view. The
“titolati,” to use the Commissioners' phrase, who
reside in Malta, consist of three distinct classes.
There are some whose titles were conferred by
ancient kings before the Order of St. John assumed
the sovereignty of the islands. There are some whose
titles were conferred by the Grand Masters, who
appear in the eighteenth century, after they had been
nearly two hundred years at Valetta, to have suddenly

discovered that they were able to make grants of
nobility to their subjects. Lastly, there are titles
granted by foreign potentates to Maltese subjects,
and recognised by the Grand Masters. Besides these
three classes, which are easily defined, the Commissioners
notice a number of titles “conferred by
foreign authorities, but never recognised in Malta.”
Following this list, again, we have one of “claims
referred to the decision of Her Majesty's Secretary
of State for the Colonies.”

Among the questions thus submitted were some of
extraordinary complication and difficulty. For example:
—the Commissioners allowed the claim of
Amadeo Preziosi to a county conferred by Victor
Amadeus, King of Sicily and Duke of Savoy, in
1718; and they reported to the Secretary of State
that the said Amadeo was the senior male representative
of the original grantee, and therefore
undoubtedly a count; but the further questions arise,
whether Count Amadeo alone of all his family is
entitled to that distinction, whether it does not extend
to all the first Count's descendants, whether it is
limited to his male descendants, and whether male
descendants of females are included. There were
nine gentlemen of the house of Preziosi who thus
claimed to be called counts; but, if the right extended
to descendants of daughters, the number of
Counts Preziosi would be fifty-nine. It is not to be
wondered at if Lord Carnarvon refused to adjudicate

upon such a question, and the case was referred back
to the Commissioners for a further report: In their
reply they came to the following conclusion, which so
well illustrates the nature of their inquiries that I
quote it entire:—“This title, originally granted to
Giuseppe Preziosi and to his male descendants, is
claimed not only by Amadeo Preziosi, the first-born
son in the grantee's primogenial line, but also by
four other gentlemen who contend that it may be
enjoyed by all the grantee's contemporary male
descendants, whether descending from the male or
female lines. We beg respectfully to refer to our
remarks on the claim to the title of Marchese conferred
by the said King Victor Amadeus, in 1717, on
Mario Testaferrata. It will be seen that the grant by
Victor Amadeus to Mario Testaferrata was made
under the law respecting titles of the Sicilian nobility,
and that it is consequently descendable to the firstborn
son only, according to the order of succession
prescribed by the jus feudale francorum. Applying
these remarks to the present case, it is obvious that
the title of Conte granted to Giuseppe Preziosi
cannot be enjoyed but by Amadeo Preziosi, whose
name has been included in our list of titolati
in our former report, and that the other gentlemen
who have asserted a right to this title have not succeeded
in making out their claims.” The secretary
may well ask, after this second report, why it could
not have been made at first; but we can understand

that, after the settlement of the Testaferrata case
referred to in the second report, the Commissioners
may have felt themselves exhausted. In this case a
marquisate was claimed by twenty-four gentlemen
simultaneously, and indirectly by some ninety others;
but the decision is adverse, not only to twenty-three
of the claimants, but to the whole two dozen. The
reasons on which the decision is founded cover twelve
pages of the report, and in the end the Commissioners
come to the conclusion that the title is “inheritable
only by the first born,” and that the possession
rests with one or other of two claimants, who will,
it is presumed, have to go to law and try the question
formally before the courts. The Commissioners came
to a similar conclusion in another case, in which a
marquisate conferred by Philip V. of Spain was
claimed by one of the Testaferrata claimants, and by
two other gentlemen of the same family. Here the
title was never registered in Malta, but it was expressly
recognised by one of the Grand Masters. One
of the claimants asserted that the eldest branch of
the family was disinherited by the original grantee,
and one might have supposed the Commission quite
capable of deciding how far such an act of disinheritance
would be valid in the case of an hereditary
title. The Testaferrata family, indeed, may justly
complain that they have much litigation laid up for
them for many days, but at least they are better off
than some of their neighbours. The existence of

two marquisates in the family is acknowledged; but in
the cases of the Azzopardi, who claimed to be barons
of Buleben, of Signor Gatt, who claimed to be Count
of Beberrua, and of a gentleman who, as honorary
secretary of the Committee of Maltese nobles by
whose action the whole question has been opened,
signed himself “Marquis,” the Commissioners decided
that the claims were not made out.

There were, in all, twenty-four titles acknowledged,
held by twenty-one “titolati”; and, in addition, four
titles were recognised as existing, but disputed between
two or more claimants. The list does not
tally either with that of the Committee of Nobles or
with that of the Marquis Crispo-Barbaro, published
in 1870; but it must be allowed, even by those who
have lost titles which they fancied to be their own,
that the result of the Commissioners' Report will be
to place the position of a Maltese noble on a footing
of security very satisfactory to the families concerned,
and calculated to give the titolati of the island a place
in European society denied to the doubtful marquises
and counts of France or Italy.

The Commissioners seem, in one case at least, to
have been too easily satisfied, and in another to have
required proof nowhere possible; but, on the whole,
little fault can be found with the Report, except in
the points indicated above. A Maltese Peerage will
doubtless soon appear; and we may hail among the
nobles of our realms such picturesque names as those

of the Baron of Ghariescem and Tabia, the Count of
Ghain Toffieha, and the Marquis of Gnien Is Sultan.
Even the ancient marquisate of Carabas pales before
the name of Serafino Ciantar, Count Wzzini-Paleo-logo,
and Baron of St. John.

It is true a majority of the titles are of very modern
origin, but it will not become Englishmen to sneer at
Maltese nobles on this account. So many members
of our own peerage date their honours since the dethronement
of the Knights in 1798, that they can
scarcely afford to despise a series of titles the first of
which was conferred in 1350, even though the last
was only granted in 1796.

It is not very clear what advantage the Maltese
nobles hope to gain by this Government recognition
of their existence. In the time of the Grand Masters
even a marquis was as the dust of the earth before
the lowest of the knights. They will now, if any
special precedence be granted to them among their
fellow-subjects, be in a better position than that they
occupied while under the rule of the Order; but, so
far as we are aware, no warrant, royal or other, has
been issued assigning to them any place or privilege
at the Vice-regal Court. Her Majesty, whose dignity
as a great Asiatic sovereign has been frequently
noticed in the past few years, appears in a character
new to many of her subjects, and we may perhaps
before long witness the creation of counts and marquises
by a sovereign of Malta whose power is at

least as great as that of any of the military monks
her predecessors.

The Dome of Mosta, a village some four miles
from Valetta, was an object I wished very much to
see. The history of the church has often been told.
The villagers, finding their place of worship too small
for the requirements of an increasing population,
determined some fifty years ago to build another.
The priest and village mason seem to have been
enterprising people. They resolved that the new
church must be built, but that the old one could not
be removed until another was ready. The site of the
two churches must be the same. These apparently
inconsistent propositions were ingeniously reconciled.
The new church was built over the old one, and as
soon as it was ready the old church was carted out,
so rapidly that not even a single Sunday's service
was omitted. The dome was built without scaffolding
within; yet it is one of the largest in Christendom.
Here is a list of the principal domes of the world,
and the importance of Mosta may be seen from it
in an instant:—

The Pantheon at Rome is only 146 feet high, but
the interior diameter is 142 feet.

St. Peter's is 333 feet in height, and the interior
diameter is 137 feet.

St. Maria, Florence, height 275, interior diameter
137 feet.

St. Paul's, London, height 220, diameter 108 feet.

Santa Sophia, Constantinople, height 182, diameter
107 feet.

The dome of Mosta is not less than 200 feet in exterior
height, 160 feet in interior height, and 124 feet
in diameter, so that it is 16 feet wider than St. Paul's,

With these may be compared the dimensions of
the dome of the Gol Gumuz, at Beejapore. I had the
particulars from an Indian civil servant who was on
board the steamer in which I came out, and as they
are not generally known, I give them here in full.
The interior is 124 feet in diameter, and 175 in
height. It therefore ranks, like Mosta, between St.
Peter's and St. Paul's. The exterior height is 198
feet. The dome covers the tomb of Mohammed
Shah, the sixth king of the Moslem dynasty in
Beejapore, who died in 1689, so that the building is
nearly contemporary with St. Paul's. The name
signifies the “Rose Dome.” The king is buried
under it with the simple inscription, “Sultan
Mohammed, a dweller in Paradise.”

Internally the extreme plainness of the Mosta
dome greatly increases its appearance of size. It is
perfectly smooth, and if the exterior was as simple
the building would be much more satisfactory. But
it is disfigured by a number of large coarse honeysuckle
scrolls, calculated to dwarf it to the utmost,
and the Ionic or quasi-Ionic capitals which support
the portico are in a style too debased to be even
picturesque.

The village is small and miserable, but built, like
the dome, of the beautiful yellow stone of which the
whole island consists. The drive from Valetta seems
to be all made through streets or between walls, and
the mud is something wonderful in its putty-like
and clinging character.

I did not expect much from Mosta, and so was
not disappointed. The interior was certainly above
my expectations: while the ugliness of the exterior
was all the more apparent because Malta abounds
in handsome domes, and that of Mosta is only one
of thirteen I counted all in view together from a
single hill above Sliema.

All I saw besides in Malta, except a silver-covered
MS. of the eleventh century in the Cathedral at Citta
Vecchia, the old town locally called Rabbat, are they
not fully described in various guide-books? I will
therefore refrain from further details of my visit, and
proceed at once to an unfortunate attempt I made
with a friend to reach Naples, there to pick up the
French steamer for Alexandria. The difficulties
of so direct a voyage are strange between two such
civilised parts of the world, and still more strange
is it that English mails are suffered to pass through
the hands of people with no stricter ideas of punctuality
than the Italians. A recent writer in the Times
complains, not unjustly, of the irregularity of the
Maltese postal arrangements, and repeats the story,
universally accepted at Valetta, that the mail boat

only leaves port when a naked candle will burn on
the forecastle. While unhappy people are anxiously
watching for letters, the Italian steamer lies safely
in Syracuse or Messina, and to all remonstrances the
Company only replies that the subsidy is too small
to cover risks. We have an insular idea that a mail
steamer must keep time. Nothing more foreign to
the Italian view of things can be conceived. Unfortunately,
too, while the sailors who convey the
mails to and from Reggio are charged with so
much care of themselves and their boat, they bestow
no such care on their precious freight, and there
is always a feeling of doubt as to letters, not so
much whether they will reach their destination a
week or a month after their time, as whether they
will get there at all. During the recent rumours of
wars the officers of the army and navy at Malta
were left for ten days at a time without letters from
home, in a state of the most unpleasant suspense.
These irregularities and others of a similar character
add an air of adventure to the voyage from Malta
to Naples which the tourist in delicate health may
prefer to dispense with; and nothing but a hope
of seeing the glories of Etna, of visiting sites with the
historical interest of Syracuse, Taormina, and Messina,
should tempt an unwary Englishman, except in the
finest weather, to run the gauntlet between Scylla
and Charybdis in an Italian steamer.

Fair laughed the afternoon over the great harbour

of Valetta as I descended to the water's edge and
took a boat to the steamer. The yellow freestone
of which the city is built rising in terrace above
terrace contrasts brilliantly with the intense blue-green
of the sea. At the mouth of the harbour a
slight surf dashes on the rocks at either side, and
the spray as it rises into the air is whiter than snow.
Though there is a calm below, the flag at the
masthead floats on the breeze, and I had been told
that if it does not hang down perpendicularly the
packet will not start. Nevertheless it does start,
not more than an hour or so after the advertised
time, and I had ample opportunities of admiring
the old Borgo or Vittoriosa, which was the seat
of the Knights' government till 1571; of seeing the
evening gun fired from St. Angelo; and of amusing
myself by British sneers at the affectionate kisses
two grimy Italians bestowed on each other as the
bell gave fallacious warning of departure.

At last, while a sunset glory in the sky turned
the domes on the height from yellow to purple, the
steamer got out of the harbour and the first plunge
was over. Already I had proof that the boat was
badly trimmed, badly steered, and manned by a
gibbering crew of gesticulating natives, who did the
least amount possible of work with the largest
amount of noise. The wind freshened, and an
experienced sailor would have suggested the use
of a small fore and aft sail to steady her. But a

fellow-passenger to whom I made the remark shook
his head. There is not, he said, a sailor on board
who would go aloft in such a breeze. Meanwhile the
company considerably thinned, and two passengers,
or three at the most, sat down to dine in a saloon
so handsomely decorated that one saw at once that
the boat was not new, a suspicion confirmed by the
subsequent discovery of a date some twenty years
old, together with the name of a firm of shipbuilders
long forgotten on the Clyde. I turned in early, as,
though it seemed tolerably smooth after the Bay
of Biscay or the Dover Channel, the ship had an
awkward way of veering to avoid a wave, and
ducking every one who had been so foolish as to
remain on deck. Taking a farewell look at the
hospitable shores of Malta, now represented by a
long dark line, decorated at frequent intervals with
brilliant lights, I descended. A hideous noise on the
deck above, a few hours later, continued at intervals
throughout the night, announced the arrival of the
packet at Syracuse, and marked the various stages
of opening the hold, raising the cargo, swinging it,
and lowering it into a barge alongside; the whole
performance carried on to a running accompaniment
of the choicest nautical Italian.

I rose with the sun, and reach the deck in time
for a glorious view. The harbour appears to have
no exit, for the town occupies a kind of promontory
between it and the sea. This was the scene of the

famous battle of the ships described by Thucydides.
There the Syracusans drew their chain of boats across
the harbour mouth. From that shore the unhappy
Athenians watched the destruction of their hopes.
I sought in vain through the misty air of the morning
for some vestiges of the quarries where the Greek
prisoners perished by slow degrees, but there, as
if floating in the sky, thousands of feet above the
town and the bay, I saw a great white cone dimly
visible through the grey morning air, its summit
just touched by the golden light. You must be hard
to please indeed, if you grumble because no smoke
proceeds from the crater; but Etna long showed
that he was still awake by an occasional puff, and
on this occasion I was fortunate to see him at all.
By degrees as the steamer neared Catania the base
came into sight, a little darker in colour than the
blue sky on either side of it. The steamer waits
at Catania till evening, and we had time for sightseeing;
but the best sight is the nearer view of Etna
which may be obtained from the public gardens, and
there, while a band plays, the afternoon passes away
pleasantly. Before many hours of the evening are
gone, we have sailed under the cliffs of Taormina,
identified Mount Hybla with its slopes covered by
dark olives, and watched the melting snow as it
gives off great white clouds, until, when night falls,
we enter the Straits of Messina and see the lights of
Reggio on the right.

And now our troubles began. The next morning
was cold and cloudy. The town did not look inviting,
yet we had to land, as the Company will not give one
breakfast on board. If you insist on some refreshment,
you have to pay double for it. By an ingenious
arrangement, which must save thousands whenever
the weather is rough, you are only fed if the ship is
actually in motion. Forty-eight hours were to be
spent at Messina before a boat would be ready to
take us on to Naples, unless we were willing to go on
board a coasting steamer. This we agreed to do, as
Messina affords few attractions, though we did go
ashore and visit a cathedral which exhibits some
traces of the architecture of Roger the Norman,
chiefly exemplified in a long series of granite columns
taken from a Roman basilica. You may visit a
picture gallery in the half-deserted University, and
try to discern the hand of the great Antonello under
the neglect and dirt of ages, but on the whole, it is
more pleasant to stay on board. We tried in vain
to remember that the immortal Dogberry was “as
pretty a piece of flesh as any in Messina,” and,
“which is more, a householder.” The town did not
interest us. From the deck we could at least look
at the mountains, now partially obscured by the
clouds of the impending storm that, hushed in comparative
repose, expected us as its evening prey.
The harbour, with its semi-circular, sickle-shaped,
natural breakwater may give the geologist food for

speculation as to the probability of its having been—
long before Etna rose from out the azure main—the
crater of a volcano; a probability increased by the
great depth of the soundings close to shore. The
historian also may amuse himself by recalling the
various scenes in which Messina has played a part,
since the Mamertine brigands here commenced the
first Punic war, and down to the days when the brave
Essex admiral, George Walton, wrote his famous
despatch to Byng from Messina:—“Sir, we have
taken and destroyed all the Spanish ships and
vessels which were upon the coast—number as per
margin.”

But as the afternoon waned, the wind rose. A
little way out to the north we could descry Scylla,
the waves breaking angrily at its foot. We watched
with misgiving as an Italian wine schooner was
caught by the current of Charybdis, and hardly succeeded
in making the mouth of the harbour. At
length, after several false alarms, we were off; first,
across the strait to Reggio, for it seems to be a
rule with every steamer leaving Messina to make
a preliminary trial-trip so far. Then back again
to Messina—nobody knows why. By this time
it was dark and stormy, and the rain drove us
below. We felt sure we should never care to see
Messina again, and were decidedly of opinion that
the beauties of the Straits were overrated. Once more
we felt the whirling tides of Charybdis, and as our

fellow-travellers dropped off one by one and shouted
in vain for help from stewards who were themselves
powerless with fright, and would not cross the deck
to save our lives, we retired to the lowest and narrowest
berths we ever tried to sleep in. I thought involuntarily
of Schiller's Diver. Was he not Cola of
Catania, and was it not Frederick II. of Sicily who
made him plunge into these very waters? Listen
how the waves wash over the deck, or rush along the
side, a thin board only between us and perhaps
or the nameless horror with the hundred arms. Such
happy visions mingled with my broken slumbers, and
it was well nothing else was broken, for with every
roll of the vessel my nose came in contact with the
roof of the berth, and if I dreamed at first that I
shared the terrors of the Diver, I ended by thinking
myself nailed down in a coffin.

As the night went by, in spite of these miseries
and a thousand others, I comforted myself with the
thought that I should be in Naples next day. There
was no sound of anchoring in a port by the way.
Evidently the violence of the gale had driven the
captain to go forward at once; and, as calmer sea is
reached, we thankfully fancied ourselves in the lee of
Capri, and turned in our cribs for a last attempt at
sleep. When I wakened it was to hear the rain
pattering on the deck above. No other sound broke

the stillness. We must be at Naples. Even through
a shower I must hasten to have a look at the famous
Bay. Hurrying on the few clothes taken off the
previous night, I made my way to the staircase
and emerged. It is scarcely daylight, but there
can be no mistake as to where the steamer lies.
There is the familiar fort; there is the lazzaretto;
there is the cemetery; beyond, through the wind
and the rain, across the rough sea outside, is Reggio.
We are back in Messina, and it is all for nothing
that we have spent the night between Scylla and
Charybdis.

MOSTA.

From Malta to Suez—Backsheesh—The Railway Station—The Dervish
—A Testimony—Cairo—The rule of the Turk—Palaces—Oppression
—Difficulty of telling the Truth.

“BACKSHEESH!”

THE voyage from Malta by Port Said through the
canal to Suez is very uneventful as a rule, but very
pleasant. The only scenery is the ever-changing
view of the turquoise sea, tinted with a depth of
colour elsewhere I am sure unknown. Port Said I
have often heard described as “a beastly hole,” and
I think the description only too mild. The canal
is a long ditch, nothing more, but the lakes are not
so unpleasant, except for a want of vegetation on
their margins, as I had expected. The clearness of
the deep green water in Lake Timsah I have never
seen equalled. Still there is nothing especially
oriental in the scenery, and the traveller is well into

Egypt before he knows it. The usages, the civilisation
, the steam and the iron of the West, are still
before his eyes until he finds himself at Suez.

When he lands all things are changed at once. The
East and the West meet indeed, but their meeting
is like the meeting of fire and water. They do not
coalesce. The railway, the consuls, the post-office, the
hotel, have not made the slightest mark upon Suez. It
is an oriental city, narrow, sunny, odoriferous, though
the engine whistles and the church-bell rings in its
streets. On this account it is peculiarly interesting
to the observant stranger. He sees for the first time
the contact of the old world with the new. The contrast
between the two is put before him in its most
startling aspect. Hitherto there has been little except
the blue sky and the sunset to remind him that he is
no longer in Europe, and the first view of Suez is
from a distance. The harbour is some miles from
the town, a glorious bay—or rather, as it is called on
the maps, a gulf—with fine mountains on both sides,
and the entrance to the canal, where an endless procession
of noble ships goes up and down—great floating
barracks on their way to and from India, mail
steamers, long and low, tall black colliers, now and
then a vessel full of pilgrims for Mecca, with a Scottish
name on the bow and stern—but they do not bring
Europe to Africa. The constant traffic leaves Suez
as it was, and English eyes miss there, as much as in
Cairo or Constantinople, the flourishing appearance

which would be worn by a seaport of equal importance
at home.

There is a railway from the harbour to the
hotel; but the carriages have had no new paint or
upholstery since they first left their maker's hands
at Manchester. The trains run—or rather the train
runs, for there is evidently but one set of carriages—
on a simple system; as soon as they are nearly full
the whistle sounds a note of interrogation; the note
is repeated at intervals, and eventually, after one or
two false starts, the train goes on at a leisurely pace.
When it has proceeded about half way an official
gets in and endeavours to sell some tickets; but no
one buys, and those passengers who can talk Arabic
taunt him for trying to make them pay. Such a thing
was never heard of. Are they not in Government
employ as well as himself? He looks incredulous at
first, then crestfallen, and as the jokes increase in
number and brilliancy, to judge by the laughter, he
retires to the footboard outside. Presently the train
comes to a standstill. There is a railing on one side
and the sea on the other, all enveloped in a blaze of
blinding sunshine. The traveller steps out on a dusty
platform, repels a host of donkey-boys, and rushes to
hide in the cool darkness of the hotel.

When he ventures to sally forth again he obtains,
without going far, a very complete idea of an Egyptian
town. He finds a heap of mud hovels, here and there
a stunted minaret striped like a zebra, an awful smell

everywhere, a few yellow dogs covered with mange, and
sitting along a shady wall a row of native women, each
in a single garment of dark blue cotton, her brown
face partly hidden by a fold which she draws across as
you pass, holding it in her teeth. They crouch in the
dust like barn-door fowl, and, as the stranger walks
by, each extends towards him an attenuated baby
covered with black flies, and feebly, almost mechanically
, cries “Backsheesh.” When I heard that magic
word I realised for the first time that I was at length
in the East, the land of romance, the scenery of the
Arabian Nights, the glorious country of the rising
sun, which poets have sung and artists have painted;
where religion and civilisation, and all things rare and
beautiful and costly, have had their birth; of which
I had thought and dreamed, wondered and read,
talked and even written, till, all my gorgeous imaginings
about to be fulfilled, I had made the pilgrimage
at last and set foot in Egypt: “Backsheesh!”

The next morning when the mosquitoes had closed
my eyelids, but not in slumber, and when my experience
of the salle aà manger had made me sceptical
of holy writ and quenched my desires for the flesh-pots
of Egypt, I found my way to the station; for,
after all, there is a station of which the railing is
only an offshoot. As we went through the sharp
morning air—for, though the thermometer deceptively
points to something like fifty-five, we felt
quite chilly—threading some passages among the

mud hovels, and seeing more filthy infants and more
brown mothers; through a wide market-place, in the
midst of which a negro was droning out ballads, and
crowds of half-clothed men, women, and children
were performing a morning toilet, which consisted
chiefly in examining their garments for fleas, we
reached at last the platform by which the train stood.
Facing the train was a kind of shed running the
whole length of the platform. A crowd of loungers
stood or sat in rows under the shadow. There was
another crowd of disappointed donkey-boys, orange-girls,
dragomans, Arabs in white shirts and brown
capotes, dandies with white turbans, embroidered
dressing-gowns, red stained nails, and yellow slippers,
all walking up and down as if seeking something.
Round the door of the ticket-office were a few men
in uniform, apparently Custom-house officers or railway
guards. Each of them wore a red fez, a long
coat, and a shepherd's plaid. The scene, as we
discovered later, is the same at every railway station
in Egypt. Here perhaps the great bay, the rugged
pink mountains, the mighty steamers making for the
mouth of the canal, divert your attention from
things nearer the eye; but wherever you go afterwords
you find that the despatch of a train is a great
public occasion at which all the inhabitants must
assist, and that between whiles a majority think it
necessary to sit motionless in the shadow of the
ticket-office, watched by an official in a red fez and a

shepherd's plaid. If you go to Egypt asking why is
this? or why is that? you will get no reply; you will
be thought mad, and you will weary yourself. It is
better to take Dante's line to heart and merely record
passing impressions. But while one sentimentalises,
perhaps, watching the strange medley of men and
manners from the carriage window; or observing the
incongruity of a puffing steam-engine with the sandy
desert, the domed mosques, the lofty palms, and the
solemn camels, there is a sudden motion of the
crowd. It divides, and an open path is made along
the platform. Is it some great pasha, or a kicking
horse, or a funeral? But we forget for a moment
that we are in the east. It is a dervish.

First came a lofty standard, about as high again as
regimental colours, but otherwise very like them. It
was borne by a tall mild-looking negro, who was also
laden with a gourd, a brass pannikin, a pipe, and
various other articles for personal use. While we
wonder what or who he is, he stops, and a kind of
ring is formed by the crowd. Into the open space
steps the dervish.

He is undersized, like most great men; but his
mien is majestic. His complexion is quite white,
of which one can easily judge, for he wears no
clothes to speak of, except that round his naked
shoulders and chest is coiled a heavy chain, supplemented
by half-a-dozen rings of solid iron. His
hair, black and curly, hangs half-way down his.

back, but rises nobly from his magnificent forehead.
His beard, like John the Baptist's, has evidently
never been touched by a razor, but flows, well
combed, over his heaving breast. He stops, looks
down, then up to heaven. There is a shudder among
the silent crowd. Then he casts up his arms and
begins to speak in a deep, solemn voice, and in
measured phrases which to our unlearned ears sound
like verse. As he waves his arms, it is apparent that
he has but one hand. The other has offended him,
and he has cut it off; but he raises the stump to
heaven in protest against the men of this generation;
and we think we see one of the old Hebrew prophets
as he speaks, and a thrill runs through us also. The
scene is deeply impressive. The crowd reply to his
eloquence by a groan, and then he takes a step or
two forward. His gait is perhaps too much of a
strut to satisfy a critical eye, and there is an expression
of cunning in his face which mars his otherwise
magnificent features.

At the moment we did not perceive this. He
walked up and down, gesticulating, but with dignity.
As he strode along he seemed to perceive no
one in his path, and all made way for him. We
hoped he would not walk into our carriage. An
official duly decorated with the shepherd's plaid
came out to him, but approached him respectfully.
He endeavoured to reason with him, to draw him
aside, to expostulate. Evidently he would be more

at home in a neighbouring mosque. His costume
was not suitable to a railway station. There were
Europeans in the train, perhaps ladies. But no, the
prophet cared for none of these things. He turned
round and lifted up the voice of his testimony
against that official, and, so to speak, withered him
up. He retired discomfited; but another came out,
greater than himself. The gymnosophist is at last
persuaded. He turns, shakes the dust of the platform
from his unshod soles, and passed out of the gate.
There is a moment of stillness, and then the bustle
breaks out again till the train starts.

After such a scene we thought we could understand
the fanaticism of the East. We saw how the dervish
could carry with him the sympathies of the crowd.
His word seemed to sway them as a wind sways the
grass. He was a man who had suffered for his
mission. He was not clothed in soft raiment. He
had mutilated his body. He was naked and maimed.
And though we understood not a word he said, yet
we could not but perceive in the well-adjusted
balance of his sentences and the full pronunciation of
every syllable that the speaker was an educated,
perhaps a learned, man. Had he commanded those
superstitious Mussulmans to kill every Frank in the
train, would they not have obeyed? Had he ordered
them to pull down the ticket-office and tear up the
rails and break in pieces the locomotive, can there be
any doubt it would have been done in an instant?

Fortunately he was merciful, though he was so
powerful; and as the station was left behind, and
we were safe out in the desert, and could see again
the red mountains, and the great ships entering
and leaving the Canal, we breathed a sigh of relief.
The prophet had not hurt a hair of our heads. The
voice of his testimony had rolled off our backs. But
one day, we felt sure, his cry would be heard further.
The fanatics might rise at his bidding. The hordes
which swept away the civilisation, such as it was,
of the seventh century might attack it again in the
nineteenth. What will they care for Mr. Rivers
Wilson, or the Daira debt, or the Canal shares?
Once the fire has been lighted, will not hundreds of
prophets like this one come forth out of their
hermitages, out of the holes and caves of the earth,
and preach defiance from the Ganges to the Nile?

So I reflected, still under the spell of the full-toned
voice and the strange weird look of the prophet on
the platform. As the train drew to a station I took
the opportunity of asking the guard what it was he
had said. After his answer I wished I had refrained.
The dervish, he told me, had demanded a free
passage by rail to the next village, and the stationmaster
had refused it. That was all.

Such was my first experience of Egypt, and it
afforded me food for reflection during the rest of a
very hot, dusty, and disagreeable journey. Soon we
left the desert, stopping a few minutes at Ismailia,

and then entering the Delta by the land of Goshen,
were at Cairo shortly after dark, and put up at one
of the best inns to be found in Europe, Asia, or
Africa—the Hotel du Nil.

Although Cairo is, strictly speaking, in Africa, it is
the most typically and intensely Asiatic city in the
world. Except, perhaps, at Damascus, there is no
other place in which the character of the Mahometan
races can be so well studied. The natives all over
Egypt call themselves not Egyptians but Arabs,
except the Copts. They talk only Arabic, and are
of the religion of the Arabian prophet. It would
not, as we shall have many occasions to remark
further on, be easy to tell what is the true source of
their race. The Copts, indeed, are easily distinguishable
from the ordinary “Arabs” by their superior
appearance. But they may be taken to represent the
ancient governing classes, those who compelled the
construction of the great monuments, and whose
features are found in the statues of the mighty
monarchs of thirty and forty centuries ago. The
lower ranks are Mahometans, and possibly many of
them are Arabs; but they are a down-trodden race,
the servants of servants, the toilers, and cannot differ
very much from the people of whom Herodotus says,
truly or falsely, that a hundred thousand of them at a
time were forced by Cheops to build his pyramid. But
Masr el Kahira, “the victorious city,” is altogether
Arab. The Roman fortress, erected to overawe

Memphis, and still known as Babylon, is tolerably
perfect;1 but it lies some miles south of Cairo, and
was not even included in the early Arab town, Fostat,
now called Old Cairo . As Egypt was one of the first
conquests of Mahomet's disciples, one of the earliest
seats of the great Caliphs, and long the centre of
Arab civilisation, it has more features of purely
Arab type than Constantinople, or indeed any other
Oriental city of its size either in Asia, or Africa.
The traveller, therefore, who desires to see the Mahometan
at home cannot do better than seek him in
Cairo, and he finds in the narrow, picturesque streets
of the old parts of the town scenes of interest which
he may seek in vain elsewhere. When he emerges
into the modern quarters the change is remarkable.
Though all the tyranny of the Turks has not sufficed
to alter the indelible characteristics of the place, and
though the wide squares, the fountains, the gardens,
the arcades, the watered roads, the rows of villas
have a half-French look, the people who crowd every
thoroughfare are as unlike anything European as
they can be. Here, a long string of groaning camels
led by a Bedouin in a white capote, carries loads of
green clover or long faggots of sugar-cane. There,
half-a-dozen blue-gowned women squat idly in the
middle of the roadway. A brown-skinned boy walks
about with no clothing on his long, lean limbs, or a
lady smothered in voluminous draperies rides by on a

donkey, her face covered with a transparent white
veil, and her knees nearly as high as her chin. A
bullock-cart with small wheels, which creak horribly
at every turn, goes past with its cargo of treacle-jars.
Hundreds of donkey boys lie in wait for a fare,
myriads of half-clothed children play lazily in the
gutters, turbaned Arabs smoke long pipes and converse
energetically at the corners, and every now and
then a pair of running footmen, in white shirts and
wide short trousers, shout to clear the way for a
carriage in which, behind half-drawn blinds, some fine
lady of the Viceregal harem takes the air. She is
accompanied, perhaps, by a little boy in European
dress, and by a governess or nurse whose bonnet and
French costume contrast strangely with the veiled
figure opposite. A still greater contrast is offered by
the appearance of the women who stand by as the
carriage passes, whose babies are carried astride on
the shoulder, or sometimes in the basket so carefully
balanced upon the head. The baskets hardly differ
from those depicted on the walls of the ancient
tombs, and probably the baby, entirely naked and its
eyes full of black flies, is much like what its ancestors
were in the days of Moses.

In the older quarters of the town the scenes are
much the same, only that there is not so much room
for observing them, for the streets are seldom wider
than Paternoster Row, and the traveller who stops to
look about him is roughly jostled by Hindbad the

porter, with his heavy bale of carpets, or the uncle of
Aladdin, with his basket of copper lamps, or the
water-carrier clanking his brazen cups, with an
immense skin slung round his stooping shoulders.

It is now (1879) more than two years since I wrote
these first impressions of the streets of Cairo home to
a literary journal. Since then I have resided for four
months together in the heart of the town at one time,
and then at another; and though my first surprise at
the strange sights I saw has worn off, and the Moosky
is as familiar to me as Regent Street, I am more than
ever convinced that I was correct in saying that those
sanguine people who believe in the possibility of reformation
and improvement under Turkish rule should
visit Egypt. We are so often told of the enlightened
policy of the Khedive, that some of us, especially
those who only look at Cairo through the windows of
a comfortable hotel, are inclined to think that nothing
but the incorrigible stupidity of the people prevents
their improvement. But a little inquiry soon demonstrates
the truth.

Two years ago the viceroy was still popular in
England. It was impossible to get at the ear of the
public about him. In spite of the fact that he is so
completely a Turk that in his own family and court
he speaks Turkish, a language as foreign to Arabic as
it is to English, I was constantly told that he was not
a Turk, and that he had identified himself completely
with the country he rules. As to what constitutes a

Turk by descent I cannot say. It would require the
genius of Swift to unravel his pedigree: But as to
his identifying himself with Egypt, it is a kind of
identification similar with that by which the cat may
be said to be identified with the mouse she has
swallowed. His development of Egypt has ended
in reducing her to a state of poverty unknown elsewhere.
No doubt he has had money to spend, and
equally, without doubt, he has had money to hoard;
and has laid up his wealth where neither moth nor
rust corrupts, and where no Turk may embezzle—perhaps
in Paris or London; but of the vast sums
which have passed through his hands it is perfectly
safe to say not one single Arab peasant on the Nile
has been in any way the better.

Some years ago an apology for the Khedive and
his family was published in London, and to their endless
shame be it spoken, most of the London papers
reviewed it favourably, although in full possession of
the real facts. The apologist, among other things,
asserted the conjugal purity of several members of
the family, which read strangely where crowds of
black eunuchs, and carriages full of half-veiled ladies,
were well-recognised sights. If Prince — has only
one wife, which is very possible, how many concubines
has he? Why did his grandmother make him a present
of three Circassian slaves on his birthday? What
on earth can his one wife want with two housefuls of
attendants who rival or surpass herself in beauty?

About the works of such apologists it would be possible
to write any number of similar questions. I
would ask them two: Is it true that black slaves
are imported now with only as much disguise as deceives
people who wish to be deceived? Is it true
that the Khedive's chief eunuch—for nobody can
deny that he has a chief eunuch and hundreds of
others—keeps an establishment for the production
and education of these ornaments of the hareem?

All round about Cairo there are vast lath and
plaster buildings, chiefly standing in wide gardens
and surrounded by high walls; if you ask what they
are, the answer is always the same—palaces of the
Khedive. Three years ago it was reported that his
Highness had thirty-three palaces, and he still went
on building. A few days ago a friend of mine and I
counted twenty on our fingers. A magnificent but
flimsy villa, surrounded by a large park, has just
been furnished at Gheezeh, in sight of the Pyramids.
Another is in process of completion on the opposite
side of the road. There is a long, low house, round
three sides of a square, in the heart of the city. There
is a long red wall made of hoarding painted to imitate
brickwork, facing the island of Roda. There is
a splendid but tawdry plasterwork palace at Gezireh,
on the west bank opposite Boolak. There is a half-built
“hotel” in the French style near Old Cairo .
There is a vast series of irregular halls and rooms
of state in the citadel. In fact, everywhere you turn

there is some such house building, or built, or abandoned
and closed; and every one is a “palace of the
Khedive.” It is the same as you ascend the river,
until it becomes one of the standing jokes of the
Nile voyage wherever a house, or gardens, or white
walls appear, to ask, “Is that a palace of the Khedive?”
And in nine cases out of ten the answer is
in the affirmative, while in the tenth case it is that
the building in question belongs to one of the Khedive's
sons, or sons-in-law, or stepmothers, or cast-off
concubines. The money that has been spent on
them would have built the pyramids of Gheezeh,
yet in any climate but Egypt they would not stand
a single winter. They are all made of the same
durable materials, namely, lath and plaster. Yet I
heard lately that a single staircase in one of them
cost 20,000l., and that the Khedive took a dislike to
it as soon as it was finished, and so it was pulled
down and another built at a similar cost.

When we arrived from the upper Nile in a dahabeeah
we anchored our boat near the road to the
Pyramids, and remained in her for some days. Every
morning when we looked out of our windows early we
saw a long and melancholy procession on the bank. First
came an ill-looking man in a red fez and a long white
shirt, carrying a cane. Then came two or three dozen
boys and girls, half naked, footsore, weeping as they
limped along, or trying to sing a kind of slow chorus,
and following them another man with a cane, which

he freely used to encourage the loiterers. This was
a gang of day labourers. The Khedive was filling
up some low-lying land with earth taken from the
river's bank, and these poor little wretches had been
requisitioned from the villages and suburbs to carry
the soil from one side of the road to the other. They
were paid a microscopic sum—at least it was paid to
the taskmaster—and we may hope against hope that
they ever got any of it. In the hot midday we passed
by the scene of labour and saw them at work, and

after sunset we heard the sad chant of the morning and
saw the same processions, without the canes, going
home. It was shocking to see young girls carrying
huge burdens of earth, or baskets of lime for the
builders, or running up and down to the Nile for water
for the workers, their feet and often their bare shoulders
bleeding. Their lives were indeed “bitter with hard
bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of
service in the field.” Forced labour is still the rule
all through Egypt, as it probably was thirty centuries
ago. All the great works have been performed by it.

At the sugar factories in Upper Egypt, at the Canal
works, at the railways, and, above all, at the palaces
of the Khedive, the labourers are driven to their
tasks, and are paid as their masters please.

There has of late been a little improvement in the
arrangements at sugar factories, and in one I was
recently assured that some small payment was made
once a month in silver, but this is under the new
management. Under the old the workmen used to
receive a portion of treacle, valued at the highest
market price, for their wages; and, if they liked, could
sell it back again at the lowest price. Just as we may
suppose the great pyramids on the long line of hills
above the ancient Memphis to be symbolical of the
tyranny which afflicted the labouring population of
the vast city so many centuries ago, so the earth-works,
the long walls, the high roadways, and the
palaces of the Khedive are signs of the afflictions
which English money enables the Turkish rulers to
lay upon Cairo and all Egypt.

To write as the Khedive's apologists have written
an Englishman must divest himself of all the ideas in
which Englishmen glory. He must blind his eyes to
oppression and injustice, must close his ears to the
cries of children bleeding from the taskmaster's lash,
must steel his heart against pity, lest haply he should
see extortion and cruelty and slavery, and be moved
to protest against them. I have nothing to say
against the view that it is inexpedient we should

become the owners of Egypt. I do not wish to
meddle in political questions; but the Englishman
who can think or speak favourably of the Turkish
rule in Egypt has not seen how the money is made
up which is to pay the debt. He knows nothing of
the domestic institutions by which money, soldiers,
slaves, eunuchs, even estates, are obtained. He has
not stood by while land has been seized; sugar
mills built by the forced labour of men and women,
and little boys and girls; railways made by a
requisition of beasts of burden; cane for manufacture
grown in spite of the cultivators' wishes, paid for at a
price fixed by the buyer, and finally turned into sugar
by a conscription of all the able-bodied hands in the
district. It is unfortunately but too true that this
is the rule and not the exception wherever a manufactory
has been started; and yet the apologists
wonder that the people are averse to improvement,
and prefer agriculture to skilled industry and commerce.
Cotton and sugar might be very profitable
to them; but as things are at present managed, cotton
and sugar stand to them as a cause of ceaseless
oppression, of poverty and starvation, of tears and
death. No book on the political condition of Egypt
can be considered trustworthy which omits to explain
that the Turks have turned an elective government
into a despotism, have helped themselves to the land
where and when they pleased, have by wars and conscriptions
deprived the country of the population

which the gain of life over death would have led us
to expect, and have, by oppression, extortion, injustice,
taxation, forced labour, torture, and every form
of misgovernment, rendered themselves so hateful to
their subjects that the family of the beneficent ruler,
whom English writers extol, cannot appear in the
streets without a guard; and that, after fifteen years
of his beneficence, the fellah is afraid to have any
money or to appear richer than his neighbours.

It cannot be from any inherent defect in the mental
constitution of the people of Egypt that they are
unable to amass wealth, or to excel in manual industry,
or to improve in their system of agriculture. On
the contrary, it is easy to see that at a period not very
remote their forefathers raised beautiful houses,
adorned with cunningly-carved woodwork, carpeted
with needlework in divers colours, and built with that
idea of permanence so wanting in all the Egyptian
houses of to-day. It is easy to see that not long ago,
even under such rulers as the Mamelukes, there was
a public spirit, an enterprise, an independence now
wholly gone.

Personally, no doubt, the Khedive is all he is described
by his apologists, indefatigable, humane, well
educated, and, above all, hospitable; at least, I have
no authentic information to the contrary. But allowing
that he is personally the most honest and honourable
of men, has he, among all the Turkish officials
under him, one who deserves the same character? It

is an insult to common sense to tell us that the slave-trade
has ceased on the Nile, or that the Government
are doing their best to suppress it, or that
the imported negroes are “infinitely better off than
the free-born fellahs.” How is it that in the streets of
Cairo the European traveller is everywhere shocked
with the sight of hideous beings who have been mutilated
to fit them for the service of the harem, and
who swarm at the doors of the innumerable palaces
of the Khedive? It is easy to point out the mildness
of Oriental slavery, and one recent writer makes a
curious statement as a palliation of the crime of employing
eunuchs—namely, that they are no longer
brought from Assioot, but from Kordofan and Darfur.
But it would be instructive to hear what apologists
have to say about Sadyk, a man who had been a
fellah himself, and who was, therefore, the better able
to squeeze the fellahs. The Viceroy was enriched by
Sadyk, and when he had done his part he was thrown
aside, as a Tudor three hundred years ago in England
threw aside his Chancellors.

One would like to know what they have to say
about the public sale of Sadyk's domestic slaves at
Cairo, a sale almost as abhorrent to the native Egyptian
mind as it would be to the English. The fact
was officially “explained,” but not denied. It would
have been interesting to know that the vast estates
accumulated by the Minister were returned to their
rightful owners. Had it been possible to give an

example of such a reparation, we may feel sure
the most would have been made of it. Indeed, it is
somewhat surprising that none of his advisers recommended
the Viceroy to make such an example for
the benefit of his foreign apologists. But the history
of Sadyk and the beneficent Government of which
he was for so many years the head, is precisely that
of the two polypes, of which one reads that they
found a worm, and commencing at either end, swallowed
and swallowed till they met. Then the larger
polype swallowed the smaller.

To say that the Viceregal Government is unpopular with the lower orders would be to speak too
favourably of it, as we understand the unpopularity
of an English Minister. A recent traveller had occasion
to ask a well-to-do fellah if he could say to
whom one of the suburban mansions belonged. “It
is, of course,” was the reply, “a palace of the Khedive
now, but it was built by the man who has gone to
open the gates of Gehenna for him.” Thus a prosperous
man, as the Egyptians count prosperity, spoke
of his Sovereign and the late Finance Minister.
“But,” he was asked again, “Sadyk Pasha was
banished, not put to death?” “Well, it comes to the
same thing,” was the answer; “he went to Dongola,
and there the coffee did not agree with him.” Every
traveller who has come into contact with the lower
orders in Egypt can tell similar stories if he likes;
and it may be asserted broadly that the Turk is quite
as much disliked by the Egyptian, be he Copt or

Arab, as by the Greeks or the Armenians. He
offends their religious prejudices as well as their sense
of justice. One of the first objects seen on arrival at
Cairo is a statue representing, in bronze of colossal
size, Ibrahim Pasha, the Khedive's father, on horse-back.
To make statues is a crime of great magnitude
to the Moslem mind. It is characteristic of the
bastard civilisation grafted upon Egypt by its present
rulers, that, though the statue is bronze and a
fine work of art, the lofty pedestal is of wood,
painted in imitation of stone. A similar and equally
typical example of the way in which public works
are carried out may be seen in the mosque in the
citadel. The walls are lined with slabs of alabaster
for about twenty feet from the ground, and above
that height are painted and grained in imitation.
Immediately below this monstrous monument of
Turkish taste is the mosque of Sultan Hassan, an
edifice contemporary with our own Salisbury cathedral,
and worthy of careful study by every lover of
simplicity and beauty in architecture; and here,
while countless sums have been laid out on a French
Alhambra kind of mosque close by, the whole building
is going to destruction from neglect; its exquisite
fretwork of precious inlays dropping from the walls,
the roof of the central kiosque stripped off in great
patches, the beautiful Syrian lamps, so much praised
in the guide-books, all gone, and the vane of the graceful
minaret bowing to its fall. Yet it may be safely
predicted that something of Sultan Hassan's building

will remain long after every palace of the Khedive
has disappeared.

English bondholders may wonder where their
money has gone, but a few days in Cairo would
soon settle their minds. Let them look at the
palaces, as aforesaid; let them walk past two or three
of the vast barracks, each filled with black regiments,
every man of which has been bought from a slave-dealer
in Central Africa and transported at immense
cost, in spite of all treaties with the abolitionists.
Let them stand aside as two grooms in purple and
gold and fine linen clear the way for a magnificent
pair of English high-stepping horses, drawing the carriage
in which one of the Viceregal family is seated,
while a couple of hussars trot at the wheels; let
them, in short, see Cairo as it is, and not through the
false gloss of half French civilisation which its Turkish
conquerors have imposed on it.

A WINDOW IN CAIRO.

Heliopolis—The Delta—The Peasant Cultivator—Towfik Pasha—The
Obelisk—The Inscription—Other Obelisks.

OBELISK IN CAIRO.

THE greenest drive near Cairo and the shadiest is to
On, the place to which the Greeks gave the name of
Heliopolis. Of the city and temple nothing visible

remains, except a mud wall and the famous obelisk,
an obelisk on which English visitors always make the
remark that Joseph must have seen it. To my mind
it is more interesting to reflect that it was where it
still stands full 1,000 years before Joseph came into
Egypt. The obelisk is there still, and many other
things remain just as he saw them—the green fields,
the degraded labourer, the wide, flat expanse stretching
away towards the north, the yellow sandy hills
closing in towards the south, and the silver waves of
the river here dividing into the great arms which
encompass and water the rich districts of the Delta.

It is well worth while to climb the Mokattem Hill
above Cairo, for the sake of seeing this view alone.
The position of Heliopolis is seen as on a map, and
the old site of Memphis, ten miles higher up, is easily
made out from the fringe of pyramids which stretches
between it and the western desert.

This view and the drive or ride to Heliopolis will
give a stranger a very good idea of the immense
fertility of all the land upon which the annual inundation
comes. If the level is one inch, nay, half an
inch above the inundation, the soil is sandy and
barren.

On the road the great palace of Abbas Pasha
is passed, and close to it an enormous barrack,
which a year ago was crowded with soldiers. The
tall octagon towers are signal stations, which Abbas
built to protect him from any danger of insurrection.

He had a morbid dread that he would be assassinated.
Perhaps conscience made a coward of him
for, though by no means a bad ruler, he was addicted
to the most hideous vice, and in the event his fears
were but too well justified. While he was residing at
a palace at Benha, in the Delta, a quarrel or intrigue
among his wretched favourites led to the entrance
of two of them into his chamber at night, when
they put him to a death of such cruelty that the
fate of Edward in Berkeley Castle was comparatively
merciful.

Past the Abasseeyeh the road enters a grove of
cactus, while feathery sont-trees arch overhead.
Half a mile further and we are on the soil of the
Delta, and surrounded by a beautiful greenness to
which no painter can do justice.

The land, as its peasant cultivators say, is gold, not
mud. For ordinary crops it requires no manure and
little labour. The yield, with the most primitive
tillage, is enormous. Two crops of corn may be
grown in a year, or even three. The moment a canal
is made, the ground in its vicinity grows green. It
needs no preparation for the seed but a little surface
scratching and small watercourses for irrigation.
Along the Nile the shadoof goes all day long, except
during the inundation, when it is not required. In
some places the sakia, with its rows of graceful
earthen jars, raises water both day and night. At
the wheel two yoke of patient oxen relieve each

other, driven by a child who ought to be at school.
The Khedive spent a great deal of money in putting
up large pumping-engines; but they have turned out
useless, partly because of the non-existence of fuel,
partly because the smaller parts wear out, and cannot
be replaced by native workmen. There was lately
some talk of cutting a canal and floating wood down
from the Upper Nile. M. Lesseps has lately been
over the ground, but bondholders have by this time
become chary of their help. Meanwhile the old
labour-wasting methods must be retained. New
canals might be multiplied indefinitely, always with
splendid results, but, under the present system of
forced labour, they can only be cut at the cost
of the lives of many bread-winners. The Fellah,
drafted away from his home, hard worked, ill-fed,
harshly treated, dies of the slightest illness. It used
to be said that, when a new canal was begun, the
Khedive secured the land nearest to it, his officers what
came next, and the Fellah who made it got little or
no benefit. He is obliged still to stand at his bucket,
and, with only a rag round his loins, work the water
up to his little tenement, while the intense sun blazes
down on his bare back and shaven head. It is unlikely
that any private enterprise can spring up
amongst the people to improve the cultivation of
their farms. They are too poor, and have not time
to learn about new inventions. The fine climate
prevents them from being braced to exertion and

rebellion, as would be the case in a more northerly
country. But they do feel very sore to see the land
slipping into the hands of large proprietors who take
all the finest ground for sugar-canes.

The name of Fellaheen is properly only applied to
the inhabitants of the Delta. The true Fellah is a
very different person from the proud Arab of the
Howara.

Constant ill-usage has made him a coward and a
liar, but he has courage and endurance when suffering
is inevitable. You may see a man at work in heavy
irons, yet he wears a cheerful countenance, and
greets an old acquaintance with a pleasant laugh.
He has committed no crime, and everybody knows
it; but a crime had been committed, and somebody
had to be punished. “Khismet” willed that he
should be charged, and, having no money to bribe
the judge, he is condemned. So, too, the old story is
still true that rather than pay an increased tax, he
will submit to the bastinado, and may be heard to
boast of the number of blows he can bear, and the
weeks during which he was unable to put his feet to
the ground. He looks upon the Government as his
natural enemy, and with good cause regards taxation
as a Border farmer must have regarded black mail.
To him the Khedive is the lineal successor of the
Bedouin freebooter who robbed his forefathers. He
has no remedy against an overcharge, and no voice in
the assessment of the tax. If there were a printed

form setting forth his liabilities, it would be useless,
for he could not read it. By nature he is gay,
sober, and saving, yet he can be lavish on occasions,
and does not grudge money spent in hospitality or
charity.

His own wants are few, but among them is music.
Nothing can be done without singing. He sings at
work, at play, in the field, at the wedding, at the
funeral, as he rows his boat, as he rides his camel, in
fact everywhere. Sometimes, as when he works the
shadoof, there is a great beauty in the oft-repeated
cadence; but generally the European ear can find no
melody in his music. The scale differs so much from
ours that it cannot be played on any of our keyed
instruments; and the principles on which it is founded
are so involved that it is hardly possible even for a
trained musician to unravel it. There is probably a
mixture of the Greek and Asiatic scales; possibly
there is a remnant of old Egyptian harmony. The
scientific musician finds much to interest him in
following a song on the violin, but to the vulgar
musical ear it is distracting. It may be roundly
asserted that the attempts made by Lane and by
others to write Arab melodies in our notation are
ludicrous failures. The native performers sometimes
show great skill in manipulating an instrument
with two strings, and some Egyptian Paganini may
blush unheard and waste his sweetness among dusky
sailors on the Nile. At Cairo a leaning towards the

European scale is sometimes very perceptible, owing
to the opera companies which go there every year;
and the military bands practise a kind of compromise
which is most distressing to hear: but a concert of
expert native performers in the Esbekeeyeh Gardens
is well worth hearing. In the country, singers extemporise
to a tune, but have special airs appropriate
to all possible occasions. No other art is practised,
and life goes on under the most simple conditions.

The Fellah wears but one garment, and suffers
from cold in winter, for he has no fire and no bedclothes,
except perhaps a kind of quilt. He lives
on unleavened bread, sour milk, raw vegetables, but
sometimes for weeks together has nothing but dried
dates. In towns the food is sold ready cooked, and
consists of different kinds of haricots and lentils. His
house is roofless, except for a few canes laid across
the low mud walls. It contains no furniture; but in
Upper Egypt there is generally a mat at the door
and a sort of raised divan made of mud. He can
afford but one wife, who, like himself, has but one
garment and a hood or veil, while his children go
naked. In this respect, indeed, travellers remark
greater poverty year by year. There is immense
mortality among the children, partly, no doubt, from
the dirt in which they are kept, as they are never
washed before they are seven years old, but partly
also from the absence of medical aid and the universal
ignorance of the causes of disease. The women

are in every respect inferior to the men. They are
too poor to have employment; they have no stockings
to darn, no house linen to mend, no furniture or
cooking implements to clean. They wash their one
garment in the river, cleaning it with a piece of mud
which acts like soap and pumice combined. They
wear their bracelets and necklaces in the field where
they pull corn or herd the cattle. They carry all the

FELLAH WOMEN.

water required in their houses from the river in heavy
jars, and sit long on the bank gossiping and catching
fleas. Their highest idea of life consists in doing
nothing. The daughters of a family are kept at
home as long as possible, as it is a mark of respectability
to retain them at least till they reach fifteen;
but this advanced age is only attained in comparatively
wealthy homes.

Before his door is a row of round mud bins like
barrels for storing corn; and there are separate
pigeon-houses. The pigeons everywhere eat more
than they are worth, and contribute greatly to the
dirt of the houses in Lower Egypt. Fever is rare,
considering the filth, but there are stomach complaints
and innumerable skin diseases of great severity.
Ophthalmia is said to be decreasing in Cairo
since the opening of wider and better-watered streets,
but everywhere else it is very common, and seems to
be carried by the flies from child to child. There
is also a mysterious sleeping sickness, about which
doctors differ; it is always fatal. A man comes
home from his work, lies down, and sleeps for three
days, when he dies. It is impossible to get leave
to make a post-mortem examination, though English
physicians have repeatedly attempted it.

It is hard to imagine a more dreary existence than
that led by the ordinary Fellah. He is born, works
hard all his life for wages of which he is robbed at
intervals under the name of government, and dies in
his birthplace, his whole view through life having been
bounded by the table-topped mountain at his own
side of the river and the table-topped mountain at
the other, under whose rocky sides a few little mud
domes, a few little heaps of shining pebbles, mark
the nameless graves of his people, the place to
which, when the end comes, his body will be rowed
across the Nile to a chant from the Koran, just as five

thousand years ago his forefathers were ferried over
to the mummy pits, while a hymn was sung to Osiris,
the Judge of the Dead.

The agriculture of the ordinary Fellah of the Delta
is carried on under the simplest conditions. His year
begins on the 11th of September, when the Nile is
generally at or near its highest level. The thick,
turbid water flows over thousands of acres and gives
back in purple shadows the scintillating blue of the
cloudless skies. Scattered amidst this sea of liquid
mud rise hillocks, most of them artificial, covered
with one-story mud huts, which look ready to melt
away into the flood below. On the roofs sit rows of
naked children, surrounded by pigeons, barn-door
fowl, and perhaps a few young kids, all basking in
the vivid sunshine. The only subject of conversation
amongst the men in the village is the height to
which the river has risen or is likely to rise. A few
feet more or less to those poor people makes the
difference between abject misery and comparative
plenty, for their wants are few and easily supplied.
If the overflow is too scanty, the desert
comes creeping up and remorselessly swallows the
fields where luxuriant crops are wont to wave. If
the river rises too high, great damage is done, not
only to the wretched villages which it carries away,
but to the dykes, which are made at considerable
expenditure of time and labour, and which serve
both as pathways and defences from a flood. The

palm-trees, which, like the Irishman's pig, are often
counted upon to pay the rent, are frequently swept
away, and in some cases the cattle also. It is a
deluge without rain. The field mice must leave their
haunts, and, accompanied by the bright lizards, take
refuge on any high ground that offers. Enormous
numbers of frogs and toads are drowned or eaten by
the flocks of water and marsh birds which come from
the Mediterranean and the lakes of Lower Egypt as
soon as the inundation has become general. The
Fellah is relieved from the hard toil of the shadoof,
and can lie for a considerable part of the day at the
door of his hut, smoking, chatting, or fondling his
little children.

Dr. Klunzinger gives such a good account of the
method of raising water by the shadoof that I
must quote it in full. It is the best I have ever
met with, and is an example of the painstaking
accuracy which characterises the whole of his book
on Upper Egypt:—

“In the soft and steep banks of the river, or of a canal, a
number of trenches, with terraces behind them, are dug above
each other, the number depending on the height of the bank;
at the top a reservoir is constructed, the bottom of which is
often strengthened by layers of reeds or palm-stems. The principle
of raising the water is similar to that of a draw-well,
perhaps still more practical. On the upper ends of two pillars,
formed of rough palm-stems, or more commonly of clay, a crossbeam
is firmly attached; and, under the middle of this, a long
beam is balanced by means of a cord and bar joint (so that it
may move freely up and down). Behind, that is, at the shorter

end, the end further from the river, this beam terminates in a
colossal ball of clay; from the other end hangs a palm-twig, to
the lower extremity of which a bucket, usually of leather, is
fastened. It is the duty of the labourers standing on the terraces
to fill the bucket in the lowest basin and to empty the contents
into the next above it. The bucket is raised by the weight of
the clay ball on the arm of the lever, and the workman has only
to guide it. Thus even in ancient times did men discover how
to save labour by mechanical means. Having reached the
highest basin, the water flows by a small channel on to the
border channels of the fields that are to be watered. When the
river rises, one terrace after another is swept away; and, when it
sinks again, as many new ones are constructed every year.
The motive-power in these water-raising apparatus is a class of
men called ‘fathers of the shadoof,' who, in classical brown
nakedness, enliven at intervals the banks of the Nile, and every
now and then utter shrill and plaintive cries, while the beams
groan and the buckets splash.”

Although written about Upper Egypt, this passage
is true of the Delta, and indeed of every place where
water comes, whether by river or canal.

As the Nile recedes, the peasant's short holiday
comes to an end. It is time to begin to plough or
scratch the fertile deposit left on the fields. His
spade is the adze of his forefathers, and his harrow a
palm-trunk cut from the nearest grove. The water
which has saturated the land is so impregnated with
ammonia and organic matter that no further manuring
is necessary, and no deep steam-ploughing is required,
as the air reaches the soil through the cracks made by
the burning sun. The large number of canals which
have been cut lately mitigate the loss caused by a bad

Nile, but only to a certain degree. If, however, they
could be cut high up the country and above their present
level, the necessity for artificial irrigation would be
enormously lessened. In October begins the sowing of
the numberless trefoils, which produce fodder in abundance
both for man and beast, as the shoots of some
of the species are eagerly eaten by the natives. Flax,
wheat, and barley are also planted, most of them
being slightly sheltered from the keen north wind by
tufts of dry grass stuck in the ground. As the days
shorten, the nights become very cold, particularly
towards sunrise; and about the end of November the
European often finds himself wishing for a fire as he
heaps coverings on his bed in the clear rose-coloured
dawn.

During this autumn weather the durra, a sort of
maize which stood during the inundation, is gathered
in. The women may be seen at the doors of
their houses, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups,
“grinding at the mill,” singing monotonous ditties, or
retailing to each other the gossip which is even more
plentiful in an Arab village than in an English one.
It was the failure of this crop in the Saeed which
caused the famine of this year. After the durra is
reaped most of the winter crops of lentils, chick peas,
wheat, barley, beans, peas, lupins, safflower, lettuce,
flax, poppy, durra, are sown, and soon the bands of
emerald green, so remarkable in an Egyptian landscape,
begin to fringe the river, growing broader as

the water recedes, leaving each week a few more
inches of arable land to the industrious cultivator.
In December some of the clover is ready for its first
cutting, much to the satisfaction of the animals, who
have had little but dry forage for months. The poor
beasts have not much enjoyment in their lives, for
they are half starved, and worked to death. The state
of the donkeys and camels in the small villages is
sometimes pitiable. It is impossible to ride them
with the least pleasure, as they are almost sure either
to have broken knees or galled backs. Still, with a
heap of fragrant clover before them and a deep bed
of sand in which to roll, they, like their masters,
forget their real troubles in a momentary bliss. The
children, too, are enjoying themselves, and sit sucking
the fresh sticks of sugar-cane which are now being
cut down. Indeed the idle moments of all the inhabitants
seem devoted to tearing the cane in pieces
with their strong white teeth and crunching the crisp
juicy stalks. The quantity which the sailors of a
smart dehabeah consume during the voyage up and
down the Nile is scarcely credible. The atmosphere
is now sometimes unpleasant when there is not a brisk
wind, for evaporation is going on rapidly, and mists
may be seen in the morning all along the river banks,
but only rising a few feet as a rule. The dews are
often excessive.

By the end of January the Nile water becomes
much clearer, the greatest cold is over, and a delicious

fresh warmth gives new life to the invalids who
have suffered somewhat from the great difference of
temperature between midday and midnight. In the
following month the birds begin to pair, the lambs
dot the fields, and in the ground watered by the
canals and not submerged by the inundations some
flowers may be found. It is interesting to watch
the great flocks of waterfowl as they go to and from
their feeding-grounds, sometimes in long strings,
sometimes in clouds which almost darken the air.
Then with a good opera-glass one can examine the
habits of the various tribes of waders which fringe
the shallow reaches of the river where there is no
traffic, or study that most repulsive of all birds, a
vulture, as he squats gorged on the burning sand.
The swallows skim about overhead in the clear air,
their plumage shining with an iridescence never seen
in our grey atmosphere. The sand-martins dart out
in clouds as they are disturbed by a passing boat or
raft laden with earthenware jars.

After Easter come the south winds, so much
dreaded by the natives, to which they attribute
most of their illnesses. The Khamseen (literally
“fifty,” so called because it is said to last for fifty
days) is certainly most oppressive to Europeans,
for the same height of thermometer which with a
northerly breeze only means comfortable warmth,
with a southerly wind means exhausting and oppressive
heat. The harvest is begun, and, owing

to the graceful oriental dresses, is, to a certain
degree, a picturesque sight, but not for a moment
to be compared to an English field with its
hedgerows and trees, its wild roses and bramble-berries.
There is no harvest home, no thanksgiving
when all is safely gathered in, only the visit of the
tax-collector, whose rapacity is not satisfied until
he is sure he has not left the Fellah anything beyond
a bare subsistence in return for his year of hard
work. All through the summer irrigation must be
carried on, but in Upper Egypt a large acreage is
allowed to lie fallow; hence the finer crops of wheat.
Only a portion near the river bank is cultivated for
the melons and cucumbers which form the staple
diet of the Arabs during the hot season. Perhaps
June is the most unhealthy month, as it is that in
which the river is at its lowest, and when the smells,
always bad, are at their worst. But soon the tropical
rains in Central Africa begin to swell the stream
thousands of miles below; the rapid flow carries
away the miasma that had begun to affect the
usually healthy population, and the ever-recurring
question again arises, whether there will be a
“good Nile.”

Before Heliopolis is reached, a great palace, that
of Choobra, is passed. Here Towfik, the Khedive's
eldest son, generally resides. He has a good name
among the people in comparison with his brothers:
but it may be accounted for by remembering that

he was not born in his present elevated position
as heir to the Viceregal throne. His mother, as I
have heard, was a slave. Her master's second wife—
the Khedive has now the full number allowed by the
Prophet—besides, it is said, and probably with truth,
three hundred concubines,—the second wife was the
first to present him with a boy. Soon afterwards
the slave also presented his highness with a son,
named Mohammed Towfik, and in compliance with
the usual Moslem custom, she was eventually added
to the number of his wives, making the fourth. Then
commenced the negotiations and intrigues for altering
the succession, to make it hereditary in Ismail's
family. The second wife was her husband's
favourite, and her son would be his heir. Fabulous
sums have been named as having been
spent on the Sultan and his “advisers” in order
to obtain this favour. Of course, the unhappy
Fellah has now to pay the bill. Just as the
arrangements were brought to a successful conclusion,
the son of the second wife died, and so the
son of the bondwoman became heir to the throne,
It may be guessed that this unfortunate conclusion
did not please the Khedive, especially as, within
a few years, his second wife presented him once
more with a son, Ibrahim, the same who was lately
in England.

Towfik Pasha and his mother live at this white
house near Heliopolis; and the gardens and the

luxuriant trees add much to the beauty of the
drive.

The famous “Virgin's Tree” is the next object
of interest. It was presented by the Khedive to
the Empress of the French: and I suppose she
leases it out to its present keeper, who has put a
fence round it, and makes it a paying show. He
has a kind of public house or café adjoining, and
altogether there is something so disgusting in the
surroundings of what should be a sacred spot, that
I have never been able to bring myself to visit it.
Baedecker, indeed, says positively that the tree was
only planted a couple of hundred years ago, but I
am informed by a competent judge that it may
really be as old as the Christian era, and that,
at all events, the story that it was only planted
in 1672, is the most incredible of the two.

The obelisk is a little further on, the nearest
village being Mataarieh, which stands on an ancient
site. It is in the centre of one of the greenest fields
I ever saw , and is buried some six or seven feet
in the rich black soil. All its ruddy companions,
for there must have been a dozen or more in the
time of Joseph, are gone. I was amused to see
at one of my visits, a little, hawk, of the kind which
the ancient Egyptians worshipped as Horus, perched
close above the representation of the sacred bird
in the inscription.

The whole inscription is as follows:—

“The Horus of the Sun,

The life of all who are born,

The lord of the Upper and the Lower Land,

‘The Creator, the living image of the Sun' (Cheper Ka Ra),

The King of the Double Crown,

The life of all who are born,

The Son of the Sun,

‘Usertasen,'

The beloved of the spirits of On,

Everliving,

The Golden Horus,

The life of all who are born,

The beauteous god,

‘Cheper Ka Ra'

Has made this work

In the beginning of the thirty years cycle,—

He—the dispenser of life for evermore.”

There is a certain poetry in all this bombast.
“The beloved of the spirits of On,” the king who
favoured the wise men, the wits of the temple where
all the learning of the Egyptians was stored, shows
himself in a not unfavourable light. He is known
to have restored the temple of the sun here, after
the troublous times of the eleventh dynasty. Probably
he drove out the strangers who had colonised
the Delta, and became once more, what he here
calls himself, “Lord of the Double Crown.” But
the old simplicity is gone. The inscriptions of the
pyramid builders were very different, not only in
their style, but also in the very letters with which
they were written.

In the dark ages between the fall of the old

monarchy of the pyramid builders and the accession
of the twelfth dynasty, the worship of the gods had
entered on a new stage; and this temple of Heliopolis
must have become a regular menagerie of sacred
animals. Here Apis himself abode on his way to
take up his permanent residence with Ptah at Mennofer,
over the way. Here Menevis was accounted
the living emblem of Ra, the sun. Here were also
the two yellow lions, the ruddy hawk, the cats, the
white sow, and above all, the mysterious Vennoo, or
Phoenix, a bird represented on the monuments as
something like an egret.

The question is sometimes asked, What is there
wonderful about an obelisk? It is not an unreasonable
question. Our ideas of the architectural art
have never been made to include any reference to
the size of the materials of a building. It does not,
at first sight, occur to us that it can matter very
much whether a temple is made of bricks a few
inches thick, or of stones as many feet, so that the
temple itself is a work of magnitude. The ancient
Egyptians and the so-called Cyclopean builders
thought differently. And it must be allowed that
if they erred, it was in a right direction. People
often boast that there are few pieces of architecture
in any European city more satisfactory than the
Quadrant in Regent Street; but they do not reflect
that from an Egyptian point of view it would fall far
short of architecture. It is built of miserable little

bricks, and covered over with plaster and paint in imitation
of pilasters. It is little, if at all, better than a
piece of theatrical scenery. But, judging in this way,
we have no great building in London. Perhaps the
portico at the British Museum may be called great
from the magnitude of the stones of which the pillars
are made. They are forty-five feet in height, and
each shaft consists of only eight drums. But the
column of Diocletian at Alexandria has a shaft,
probably an obelisk rounded, seventy-three feet high,
consisting of a single block of granite taller than the
whole of one of the Ionic columns at the British
Museum, from base to entablature.

The earliest building in the world of which we have
any authentic account is a temple near the Pyramids,
recently discovered. This was made of blocks of red
granite in a rude style which may remind the English
traveller of Stonehenge; but each block is of such a
size that Stonehenge shrinks into nothing beside it.
Some of them are eighteen feet long and seven feet
high. It is evident, in short, that to the Egyptians
of all ages, from the age of the Pyramid builders to
that of the Roman Emperors, the size of the materials
of which a building was to be made was a powerful
consideration. Unquestionably they secured stability.
The difficulty which English engineers recently experienced
in moving Cleopatra's Needle gives us a
reason why so many obelisks and temples are still
standing. There are stones at Karnac forty feet

long. On the roof of the temple at Edfou there are
stones twenty feet by twelve, and more than three
feet thick. Such a roof may fall of itself; but there
is probably no engineer in Egypt who could pull it
down without gunpowder or steam. We have nothing
of this sort in England. The architects of such
buildings as Salisbury Cathedral early taught us that
greatness of parts is not necessary to grandeur of
effect; but this lesson never seems to have occurred
to the Egyptians, though the Greeks knew it, as the
little Parthenon proves, and the Romans acted on it,
but without the same success. The wonder of the
obelisk then is that it consists of a single stone.

Every writer on the subject has speculated as to
the mechanical means by which these great masses
were moved. There were shrines and colossal statues
as heavy as obelisks. The description given by
Herodotus of a shrine, “an edifice built of a single
block,” which he saw at Sais, will be fresh in the
reader's memory. It was twenty-one cubits long,
fourteen broad, and eight high, and 2,000 men were
employed for three years in transporting it by boat
from the quarry to its destination. In the tomb of
an official of the court of Usertasen, not far from Beni
Hassan, there is a representation of the removal of
such a colossus, a statue about twenty feet high
Four rows of foreign captives, forty-three in each
row, are made to drag the sledge, and seven companies
of men are waiting to take their turn at the

ropes. If so many slaves could be secured for the
service of a subject, how many more would be
employed by a king like Rameses or a queen like
Hatasoo. Mr. Poynter has saved us the trouble of
trying to realise the scene which must have been
presented when one of these exhibitions of brutal
power took place; but it will be impossible for any
one who has actually visited Egypt and seen obelisks
at home not to remember, every time he looks at our
own obelisk on the Embankment, the scenes through
which it must have passed on its way from the ridge
of the granite hill behind Syene to an island in the
West of which the Egyptians had never heard.

We have made a terrible mistake in putting this
obelisk on the said Embankment. It is literally lost
there. The only absolutely suitable site in London
was the front of the British Museum, where we should
have had a measure by which to judge of it in the
eight-drum columns of the portico, and where, moreover,
it would have been a curiosity among curiosities,
instead of a monstrous anachronism, a heathen
emblem of questionable decency, in the midst of a
so-called Christian city.

The Egyptians always put their obelisks close to
buildings of great size. Four obelisks were placed
within the temple at Karnac, and two are still
standing. Here we find them, not in a wide open
space, nor among buildings which they overtop, but in
narrow courts. The taller of the two is the tallest

now remaining perfect. It measures ninety-two feet
from the ground, and its companion is not much less,
being about seventy-five. At Luxor, a few miles off,
another pair remained till lately; but one of them
now graces the Place de la Concorde. These two
were in a wider space than the four at Karnac,
but they were close to the face of the great propylons,
by which it might have been expected that
they would be completely dwarfed. But the ancient
builders knew better. The wall behind them is
composed of enormous blocks of sandstone. Yet this
single piece of granite reaches nearly to the top of
the wall. Such is the reflection suggested by their
situation. At Karnac you see the point of the tall
pillar appearing above the tops of the palms, and of
the gigantic buildings close to it; but you see only
the point until you are near enough to recognise that
it is a monolith. The whole world cannot show such
another block, yet it is a small thing, considered
merely as a building. To see it aright you must,
said its designers, see it near; or, if any of it is to be
revealed to the world at large, it must be the extremity
only, and that surrounded by great columns
and lofty gates, so that a scale is ready to assist your
eye in estimating its size when at length you enter
the narrow precincts of the court from whose floor it
shoots up into the blue sky above your head. This
evidently was the idea of the obelisk-makers, and
they were undoubtedly right. An obelisk built up of

little bits of stone is not really an obelisk; and at
Paris the great open place, the fountains, the bridge,
the distant portico, all go, not to enhance the size of
the monolith, but to diminish it. So, too, the wide
roadway and gardens, the magnificent sweep of the
granite quay, the great breadth of the river, the
mighty span of the railway bridge, all dwarf Cleo-patra's
Needle, and deprive it of everything but its
purely antiquarian interest.

The Coptic and Muslim Calendars—The Egyptian Saints' Days—The
Dervish is not a Monk—The Colours of Turbans—The Descendants
of Mohammed—The Pilgrims' Return—The Mahmal—The Doseh.

TOMBS OF THE SULTANS.

IT is almost impossible for a stranger to know
beforehand the date at which any Coptic or Muslim
ceremony will take place. Mr. Michell's Calendar will
help him, no doubt; but even this most able and
careful work will not prophesy a delay in the return
of the pilgrims, or in the rising of the Nile, or the

cloudiness of the first night of a moon. Moreover,
in addition to the European ways of counting time,
in Egypt both the Copts and the Mahometans have
their respective almanacks, and go by them. The
Coptic is of the greatest interest to students of the
ancient remains, and the most curious part of the
Coptic calendar is formed of the Ephemeridal Notices
for every day in the year. These quaint sentences
remind us of the remarks in Partridge and other
almanacks of a hundred years ago; but they are of a
much more important character than might be supposed
at first sight. When we read that the 23rd of
January is a “good season for marriages,” or that on
the nineteenth of August there is “feebleness of bile,”
we are only disposed to be amused. But Mr. Michell
reminds us that these notes have been in use for
thousands of years, and have survived all revolutions.
“They are the echoes,” he says, “of a distant past,
and they sum up the wisdom of ages in matters of
agriculture and hygiene.” The modern calendar, in
short, is the old calendar of the days referred to
even under the Ptolemies as ancient, and “with its
paternal, and often naive, advice has embalmed the
thoughts and observations of some of the most
ancient of mummies.” The modern Copts date from
what they call the “era of Martyrs,” that is, the
second year of Diocletian, A.D. 289; and the present
year, 1295 of the Hejra, corresponds with parts
of the two Coptic years 1594-1595. Their bissextile

system starts from the so-called era of Menophres,
their leap-year always preceding ours. This
era of Menophres is of an antiquity so remote that it
takes us back to the time of Moses. Whether or not
Menophres was the Menephtah of some writers and
the Pharaoh of the Exodus, his era is B.C. 1322. In
that year it was observed that the first day of the
first month, which had, as it were, been travelling
backwards through the seasons, fell exactly upon the
day of the heliacal rising of the star Sothis. It was
ascertained that 3651/4 days elapsed between two
such risings at the latitude of Memphis. This Sothic
year, the annus quadratus of Pliny, was known to the
Ptolemies as the Alexandrine, and was converted
by Sosigenes into the Julian year. Sosigenes, an
Egyptian himself, merely transferred the New Year's
Day from autumn to winter, taking the reputed date
of the foundation of Rome as his era. But in Egypt
the first day of the year has remained the same, and
the Copts actually keep the same New Year's Day
and call their first month by the same name as the
Pharaohs more than thirty centuries ago.

Before this Sothic year was discovered, however, at
least two other systems are ascertained to have been
in use. The earliest of which we have any knowledge
consisted of 360 days, and was the first unintercalated
solar year. It seems probable that this ancient term
was employed down to a late period for registering
the dates of kings, and the festivals kept according to

it must be the most ancient. A second system was
that of 365 days, also of remote antiquity. It was
looked upon as a great discovery, with its five intercalary
days; and it became and continued the sacred
year, many festivals being celebrated according to it.
An interesting subject for research is here offered.
The comparative antiquity of some customs and
observances might be ascertained by a reference to
their places in one or other of the three systems.
But the era of Martyrs is, as we have seen, regulated
according to the Sothic period; and, beginning as
it does with the month dedicated to Thoth, and now
called Tout, it follows, no doubt, the original nomenclature
of the months. Thus Babeh is the old Paopi;
Hatour is Athor, the Egyptian Venus; Kyhak is
Koiak; Abib is Epiphi, and so on. The only things
that have changed apparently are the names of the
festivals; but Mr. Michell points out in several places
that some modern celebrations, not Coptic only,
but also Muslim, are survivals of the great days of
the ancient Pharaonic Empire. In some districts
of Upper Egypt the old division of three seasons is
still kept up, and the directions, strange and quaint
as they are, in the Coptic Calendar, are still useful as
an agricultural guide.

The Muslim Calendar is wholly different, although
it would seem that many Muslim festivals are of
Coptic origin. The lunar system is in use, an attempt
made before the time of Mohammed to modify it

and to adopt a “luni-solar” system having failed to
satisfy the conditions of either set of astronomical
phenomena. The names of some of the Arab months
betray their origin by referring to the changes of the
seasons. Ramadan, for example, signifies “Great
Heat.” But in the course of a single generation the
Arab festivals revolve through the whole year, and
the “Great Heat” falls alternately in every season
The ordinary Egyptian Almanack of the present day
is a little book of some fifty or sixty pages: For the
month of Ramadan—when the long fast, answering
to Lent, is kept—special diaries are prepared, printed
on single sheets of coloured paper, or on silk for
presentation. The Muslim Calendars are, however,
so irregularly kept that it is only by comparing
several and striking an average that Mr. Michell
was enabled to form his version. As it is, he confesses
himself unable in several cases to do more
than approximate to the date of a “Moulid.”

The Moulid E'Nebi is the great festival of all the
year for the dervishes.

Our ideas of dervishes are rather confused by our
knowledge of monasticism in Europe. But a dervish
is not a monk. He is only a devotee. To belong to
an order of dervishes only gives a man religious
privileges like those possessed, or supposed to be
possessed, by the elders of a dissenting church in
England. On certain days in the year the members
of an order assemble in certain mosques where they

recite certain prayers. All dervishes excite themselves
particularly about the time of the Prophet's
birthday, and gathering from their different employ-ments,
devote themselves during the “octave” to the
performance of their peculiar rites, generally termed
Zikrs, in his honour. The most important of these
zikrs or services is that called the Doseh or treading,
which I witnessed in 1878, and shall describe further on.

The chief outward distinction of dervishes is the
colour of the turban. The descendants of Mohammed,
a large class, form a kind of religious order themselves.
They have certain endowments, left at different ages
by the faithful, and their chief, whose appointment is
confirmed by the Khedive, has a good house in Cairo
and another on the island of Roda, as well as ample
revenues. He and all his fellow-descendants wear
green turbans. Whenever you meet a man with a
green turban you know he is descended in the female
line from Mohammed. The descendants are distinguished
into two principal families, the saeeds or
“lords,” and the shereefs or “sacred.” In addition
to these there is a family descended from Aboo Bekr,
the head of which is known as the Sheykh el Bekr.
The present sheykh holds the responsible office of
chief of all the dervish orders in Egypt: and the
treading takes place when the Sheykh of the Saidieh,
one of the orders in the Sheykh el Bekri's jurisdiction,
comes to pay a ceremonial visit to his superior on the
Prophet's birthday.

In Lane's time the Sheykh el Bekri had an official
residence near what is now the garden of the Esbekeeyeh:
but the house has been removed, and now
the visit is paid to the Sheykh in a tent which is
placed in a hollow near the road to Boolak.

The most numerous dervishes are those of an
offshoot of the great Ahmedieh order, the sect of
Bayoomeh. They wear red turbans, and are common
in the streets of Cairo, on the Nile boats, and everywhere
in short. The black turban used to be the
distinctive sign of Jews and Copts, but it is now
worn by the members of the Roofayeh order. I have
seen a bright blue turban at one or two places in
Upper Egypt, but have not been able to discover if it
was the uniform of a dervish order, or a relic of the
blue turban which Copts used to be obliged to wear.

At the zikrs, dervishes of each sect have their own
class-leader, and tents in which they “howl”: standing
in a circle and calling upon God, to the sound of slow
music, bowing at each utterance of the sacred name.
I have heard much ridicule cast upon the performance
by English visitors, but the men are evidently sincere,
and, in truth, the zikr is no more ridiculous, religiously
speaking, than many a performance I have
witnessed in Methodist meeting-houses or Papist
chapels.

As if to make up for the want of the Roman
Carnival in 1878, tourists had an extra treat at Cairo.
By a fortunate coincidence the solemn return of the

pilgrims happened in the same week as the birthday of
the Prophet. From the number of Europeans present
at the great ceremonies it might almost have been
supposed that they were got up for the entertainment
of strangers. But both the procession of the Mahmal
and the horrible Doseh are strictly religious observances.
Though mixed up with much that we should
consider almost profane, they are in reality not more
foreign to the ordinary religious sentiment than many
of our Christmas and Easter customs, and are
certainly better than much which usually goes on at
the Carnival in Florence or Paris.

The return of the pilgrims from Mecca is in many
respects an affecting and solemn sight. It culminates
in the procession of the embroidered litter which has
been carried with the caravan and comes back to its
place in the citadel. This procession commemorates
the pilgrimage of a famous lady, and is an emblem
of female sovereignty. The great sultana, Shegeret
e' Door, widow of Saleh, who died in 1249, made her
pilgrimage in a magnificent camel litter, and since her
time such a litter has been carried with each annual
caravan. It has been renewed at intervals, and is
now resplendent with scarlet and gold; but it is not
to be confounded with the Kisweh, a black and white
pall made every year for the temple of Mecca, which
travels with it, and is used until the next pilgrimage,
when it is brought back, cut in pieces, and distributed
among the faithful.

The return of the pilgrims, with the Mahmal and
the Kisweh, usually takes place some ten days or
more before the Moulid e' Nebi, the festival which
commemorates the birth and death of the Prophet,
on the 12th day of the month of Rabeea el Owwal;
but in 1878 the fear of cholera and quarantine
delays made the pilgrims late. The use of the lunar
calendar for Muslim festivals fixes the date of these
celebrations twelve days earlier every year, according
to our computation. Ceremonies which for thirty
years have been performed in autumn or summer
when few Europeans were in Egypt now take place
in the height of the tourists' season, and will for
some years to come add to the attractions of a
winter at Cairo. Horrible as the Doseh seems, it is
but seldom any one is hurt by the horse's hoofs.
He wears flat plates, like an English race-horse,
instead of shoes, and is carefully led; but the performance
is not approved by orthodox Muslims,
and it must be allowed that it savours unpleasantly
of Juggernaut.

There is an open space known as the Rumeyleh
below the citadel, where in old times executions took
place. It now communicates with an arid waste of
great size called the “Place Mohammed Ali,” and the
two form a public parade-ground where many ceremonials,
reviews, and processions are held. The
small, half-ruined mosque of Mahmoud at the northeastern
corner offers a shady place on its steps from

which the English traveller who wants to see the
people as well as the Mahmal, and who prefers to
avoid the European and to study the native sightseer.
may take his stand. On his right is the mosque of
Sultan Hassan, the beauties of which he may examine
at his leisure while waiting. On his left is the lower
gate of the citadel, the walls of which extend in a long
perspective towards a row of consular tents and
pavilions erected for distinguished visitors and the
ladies of the hareem. Facing the tents is the railway
station, and the whistle offers a strange accompaniment
to the droning of Arab songs and the thumping
of tarabookas. Beyond are the rubbish heaps of Old
Cairo, and on the pink horizon the angular forms of
two of the Pyramids are clearly visible beyond the
domes and minarets of the middle distance.

The seated part of the crowd consists chiefly of
women and children. The men are in the procession,
or walking about in the roadway, their gay dresses
looking brilliantly gorgeous in the sunshine. The
women sit under the shadow of the citadel, some on
carpets, some on the bare ground. Even the battlements
above are, so to speak, manned by women.
The traveller who has heard much of the seclusion of
the sex is surprised at their number and their apparent
freedom from restraint. Veils, more or less transparent,
are worn by most of them; but when some
twenty carriages, with English horses and liveries, but
black drivers and footmen, come down from the

palace, he observes that the ladies of the hareem
are hardly veiled at all. A gauze “yashmak” only
enhances the brightness of black eyes, and lends a
delicacy to other features which without it they might
want. But the carriages, the ladies themselves, the
horses, the crowds of eunuchs, the outriders—who
pays for them? It was impossible not to think of the
number of stories everywhere afloat that year, of
tradesmen ruined, of officials unpaid, of such small
fry as teachers and governesses from Europe left to
starve; stories which, it is to be feared, had only too
much foundation in fact.

It was pleasant to turn away from this extravagance
and observe the behaviour of the people close at
hand. The women were of all classes. Ladies in
black silk, orange-girls in blue cotton, negro nurses
in white linen, sat along the wall or on the steps of
the little mosque. The water-seller came up with a
great full skin slung round his shoulders and two
clinking cups in his hand, or a tall Arab with a tray
of sweetmeats on his head, or an old wrinkled woman
with a basket of beans, or a fine-looking girl with a
long blue dress and a gold necklace carrying a bundle
of sugar-canes and selling them at so much a foot
Every child has-a large piece to suck; and a very
moderate outlay in sugar-plums put us at once into
favour with the mothers. One of them offered me
her little girl very cheap, but would not part with her
boy on any consideration. Another made tender

inquiries for my family at home, and asked the number
of my wives and children.

At last a flourish of trumpets announces the approach
of the procession. First come troops. Four
regiments of brown or black soldiers in white uniforms
march past, and again you think of the pockets of the
bondholders, and, even sadder thought, of those
thirty thousand taken away from their fields and their
families to perish in the Balkans. Now the bugles
cease, Arab music begins, and the dervish orders,
each headed by its sheykh, with embroidered banners,
go by chanting, while twenty-one guns from the fort
above salute the coming Mahmal. Here and there
an enthusiast howls wildly, waving his hands and
rushing along through the crowd of his fellows, or
lies half insensible from heat and excitement in their
arms. At last the high red litter, glittering with gold
embroidery, and rocking from side to side at each
long step of the camel, comes in sight round the
minaret of Sultan Hassan. It is greeted with wild
cries, waving of drapery, and ejaculations of” Allah!”
Every one starts up. There is a great roar of many
voices, a great cloud of white dust, and you can
hardly command your faculties sufficiently to look for
the principal characters in the procession. There is
the owner of the holy camel, wrapped in shawls and
riding on a donkey. There is the so-called Sheykh
of the Camel—a naked dervish with long black hair
and a shining skin that glows in the hot sunbeams.

There, in gorgeous yellow and scarlet, is the old sheykh
with the scourge, who warns intending pilgrims of the
pains and trouble before them; and the official
awakener, who calls late - sleeping pilgrims, and
punishes the lazy. And among them are such great
men as the Sheykh el Sadat, who is chief among the descendants
of the Prophet in Egypt, and the Sheykh el
Bekri, who is the head of all the orders of dervishes.
But before all the lions are exhausted, the blinding
midday heat, the noise, the dust, and especially that
terrible smell which pervades all things Egyptian,
have done their work, and we are glad to escape to the
quiet of the hotel.

The interval of a day at least was necessary to brace
our nerves for the great ceremonial of the Prophet's
birthday. In Lane and other authors I had seen
accounts of it. The pictures which showed the long
row of bodies, and the horse pacing over them, were
familiar among my childish recollections. Somehow,
a Doseh had never appeared to my mind to be a
reality. It was a traveller's tale, or at best a thing
long ago abolished and forgotten. But, in truth,
fanaticism among Muslims in Egypt was never
stronger than at the present moment. Every second
Arab in Cairo belongs to some religious order, and
not one Doseh, but three at least, take place in the
course of the year. At the festival of Sultan Hanafeh,
and that of Tashtoosheh, the Sheykh of the Saidieh
dervishes rides over the bodies of his devoted

disciples, as well as on the great day of the Prophet.
The horse on which he makes his fearful journey from
the Hassaneyn to the Esbekeeyeh is used for no other
purpose. For seven years at least no less sacred
personage has mounted him than Ahmed el Kudari,
the chief of the order.

As we waited under a tent in the full noontide
heat, crowds of all classes and countries around
us, carriages full of beautiful Circassians opposite,
banners flying, drums beating, and policemen
in blue walking up and down to keep the way
clear, we found it hard to realise that we were
assisting at a religious ceremony and not at a horserace.
The few historical and local particulars we
could learn helped the truthfulness of our impressions;
but, though one or two learned Europeans can give
information, it is for the most part extremely difficult
to obtain anything better than vague tradition from
a native. On the ceremonies of his religion he is
studiously reticent. Here on the spot, you may
interrogate him in vain. He is altogether taken up
with the enthusiasm of the occasion. To him the
Doseh is a miracle, a great proof of the power of
Allah, whose name must be exalted, and proves that
the faithful are superior to the ordinary laws of nature.
In spite of the excitement visible on every brown face,
the crowd is perfectly orderly; and, what is more extraordinary,
the hundreds of infidels present are never, at
least openly, insulted. As the crowd became greater,

the noise more deafening, the sunshine more blinding,
a sudden movement far away to the right announced
the approach of the procession. The entrance to what
you cannot help calling the racecourse is close to the
English church. The open space formerly used has
been built over, and the present one is surrounded by
the new quarter and by European houses. At the
Moulid e' Nebi this open space is covered with booths
and tents as if for a fair. Every night during the
festival the faithful assemble, each under his own
religious chief in his own conventicle, and revival
meetings are held, lasting far into the night.
Foreigners are fond of visiting the show, and a
dragoman or a donkey-boy who is a dervish, can
generally place them where the religious exercises
may be witnessed. Exercises they literally are. No
Ranter, or Shaker, or Methodist of the wildest sect,
ever set his hearers harder physical tasks. When the
great day comes all are excited to the highest pitch,
and, if necessary, hasheesh does the rest.

Fighting my way with difficulty to the edge of the
living pavement, I saw some two hundred men lying
close, side by side, all their bare feet turned one way,
all their faces hidden in their folded arms. A man
walked along on them, and jammed them closer and
closer. Then, one after another, six men, bearing tall
standards, trod heavily past. The road was not quite
straight, the crowd pressed closer, and we could not
see more than a few yards in either direction. By the

feet of the prostrate dervishes their best friends stood
chanting a hymn, and fanning them with a regular
motion. At length the sheykh appeared. He was
preceded by a standard-bearer. The horse was led
by two men. His gait was very unsteady, and the
sheykh, a large dark man of middle age, appeared to
be asleep or fainting in the saddle, and, though he
was supported by two men, rocked heavily from side
to side. The horse, a fine grey Arab, went very
slowly, as if impressed with the solemnity of the
occasion. They were past in a moment, but not
before I had heard the sound of the horse's hoofs
on the men's bodies, a hollow thump which haunted
my ears all the rest of the day.

The Peculiarity of the Collection—M. Mariette's researches—The most
Ancient Art in the World—Enumeration of the chief Examples of
the Early Period—Conclusions as to Life and Manners under
the Ancient Kings—A Discourse of Scarabs.

ENTRANCE OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.

IT is a subject for constant regret that the Egyptian
collections in European museums are wanting in the
characteristic most likely to make a museum useful

to the student. At Boolak they know whence every
piece came. They know where and how it was found.
It follows that they can always at least approximate
to its chronological position—not perhaps to its actual
date, for dates, as we count them, do not apply to the
early periods of Egyptian history.

Mariette Bey, the curator of the museum, has gone
to work in a very simple and intelligible way as
regards this difficulty. He has adopted, merely for
experimental purposes, the chronology of the only
authority that can in any way be called contemporary,
and has provisionally used the narrative of Manetho,
which at least gives the student a succession of names
and events. I use the word provisionally because his
system is like a working theory in astronomy; it
squares, so far as his investigations have gone, with
the testimony afforded by the ancient documentary
evidence of contemporary inscriptions, while the others
all require a certain allowance, a margin of doubt, a
possibility or probability of error, which, although
we may prefer one or another, render them at present
less easy to use in the working of problems. The
lists of Manetho have been adopted of necessity
by most of the theoretical chronologists, but with
modifications more or less serious. Some of these
modifications may be reasonable, others are wholly
untenable, and of most it is enough to say that
further information would be necessary to a decided
opinion. Meanwhile, for practical purposes, M.

Mariette Bey, whatever his private views may be, has
placed his sole reliance on Manetho, as he stands,
modified only by the monuments.

The work of Herr Brugsch has been to form a
connected history from those monuments, a work
he has admirably performed. M. Mariette has not
trespassed on this ground, but has simply brought
together and catalogued all the remains of ancient
art he can find, or can get money enough to dig for.
He looks upon the monuments as the “only trustworthy
source of history:” and, preserving his
judgment unwarped by what has been written in
ancient or modern times, endeavours by straightforward
investigations to learn the truth from them.
There is this advantage about his method, that
Egyptian history during by far the longest period,
is like the great Egyptian river. The Nile has no
affluents for the first twelve hundred miles from its
mouth, and the history runs alone from the time of
the first dynasty, which M. Mariette Bey provisionally
places five thousand years B.C., to that of Abraham,
a period of perhaps three thousand years.

There is probably no parallel, even in China or
Japan, to this early course of Egyptian history.
The student is troubled with no side issues. Before
the world began for other nations there was life
and intellectual activity at This. Where did it
come from? Was Menes of the people of the land,
or did he and the first dynasty which he founded

come from the scene of some still older civilisation
to introduce order and law to the Nile valley?
Before him there had reigned sixteen demigods, so
Manetho says, and Menes would seem to have been
the first king who claimed to be only a mortal.
When he had sat on his throne for sixty-two years,
he was killed by a hippopotamus. His successor,
Athothis, reigned for fifty-seven years, and was a
physician. There were after him six more kings of
the first dynasty. I confess to a feeling of pleasure
in lingering over these records. They are so far
unproved by any evidence. M. Mariette has worked
back to the third dynasty, but of the first he says
that he is certain only of one thing, that Menes is
a real historical personage. No monuments remain,
or rather, none have been discovered, that can with
certainty be attributed to him or his family. M.
Mariette has long been seeking anxiously at Abydos,
on the site of This, and has no doubt found a few
evidences that Manetho is as much to be depended
on here as later; but it is not until the reigns of
the fourth dynasty that anything like historical
succession of events can be illustrated from the
monuments. The one great fact which we deduce
from his researches is that the lists of Manetho,
where they can be tested by external evidence,
are in the main perfectly correct. Where they
differ from authentic inscriptions the difference is
easily accounted for, and the drift of all the recent

discoveries has been to confirm them in a manner
which can only be called startling. When we read
that at a period which he places seven or eight
centuries before the Creation, according to our
ordinary reckoning, Binothris of the second dynasty
decided that women might hold the imperial government,
or that Tosorthrus of the third dynasty built
a stone house and greatly patronised writing, we
feel sure that some historical event is indicated,
perhaps obscurely, and cannot but hope M. Mariette
may come upon evidence to confirm it, as he has
come upon evidence to confirm statements of a
later date but equal antecedent improbability.

When we visit the Boolak Museum, then, we find
an arrangement, so far as anything can be arranged
in the wretched building, which enables us to trace
the history of Egypt and Egyptian art back step by
step from the latest Roman bust to the earliest statue
portrait. There is no flaw in the chain, though there
are so many blanks in the chronology. It is perfectly
continuous and unbroken; and when you apply to it
a question which M. Mariette asks with respect to the
pyramids, you arrive at a very definite but very startling
conclusion. M. Mariette asks where are the signs
of the infancy of Egyptian art? The further back we
go the more complete it appears. The magnificent
diorite statue of Chafra—once considered the oldest
portrait in the world—has been superseded from its
priority by the wooden figure from Sakkara, The

want of conventionality in this amazing portrait
places it above the noble but stiff statue of Chafra.
But the wooden man has himself been superseded by
the oldest monuments yet discovered, which are still
more life-like, still more unconventional, still more
truly artistic than anything yet found of a later period.

In short, the further back you go, the better the
style. It is evident the style grew up by degrees.
It is the result of centuries of study and practice.
The two life-like figures found at Maydoom were not
modelled in the infancy of art.

Such is the question suggested by a visit to
Boolak; and there only can the ancient arts be
studied with trustworthy facts before us. It is hopeless
just yet to expect any improvement at the
British Museum. The theory of Sir Gardiner Wilkinson
evidently was, that all the people whom he
classed as “ancient Egyptians” lived much about
the same time; and his system has been pursued in
the mixture of the minor objects, while the larger
are only recognised by their inscriptions, nothing
being known about the places where the majority
were found. Had the statues of Ra-hotep and
Nefert been brought to England in this way, it is
more than probable they would have been catalogued
as Ptolemaic, possibly as Ethiopian, while it is
quite certain that the fresco of the Pasturing Geese
(see p. 209)—a picture contemporary with the statues
—would have been considered Greco-Roman.

These marvellous statues are placed apart from the
other objects belonging to what M. Mariette calls
“l'Ancien Empire” in a chamber not so near the
damp of the river's bank as that in which the rest of
the very early remains are arranged. They are rather
less than life-size, but otherwise absolutely life-like.
After you have gazed into the depth of Nefert's eyes;
you feel, in spite of their being made of crystal and
marble, that you have personal acquaintance with her.
The beautifully-fitting linen dress, the feet guiltless of
shoes, the absence of all ornament except a necklace
of emeralds and rubies, the neat “snood” which binds
her hair—all, you are convinced, are as much portraits
as the face itself. The figure is full of a quality of
reality which, seeing it is almost all we have of the
earliest art, is better for us than a more idealised
style of work. It is impossible even to approximate
to the age of this and the companion work. Lepsius
gives B.C. 3122 as the probable date of the reign of
Seneferoo; but as he makes that monarch the first
king of the fourth dynasty, while most of the recent
authorities place him toward the end of the third,
these statues of the son and daughter-in-law of
Seneferoo may be even older. But all chronology is
guesswork before the twelfth dynasty—a fact but
too often, to be acknowledged in the present state
of our information.

The companion statue is not so interesting, but
even more life-like; and the hieroglyphics on the

seat, viewed as the earliest examples of the art of
writing yet identified, possess an interest for me, I
confess, out of all proportion to their subject.1

The assemblage of objects of the period of the
early monarchy in its own salle—that of the third,
fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties — at the Boolak
Museum, is the best that has ever been brought
together. M. Mariette has made extensive searches
through the grave-mounds of these periods at Gheezeh,
Sakkara, Maydoom, and Abood. After the
statues I have just mentioned, the wooden man and
the statues—for there are nine of them, of different
degrees of merit—of Chafra, the most interesting of
these early monuments are in a room reserved for
specimens of the same period. Among them is the
heavy granite sarcophagus of Shoofoo-anch (the life
of Shoofoo), which stands in the centre of the chamber.
Apart from the value of a relic of so ancient a
time, this great coffin has a double interest. The
personage buried in it was attached to the court of
the monarch, after whom he was called, as superintendent
of the royal buildings. He must therefore
have had a large share in the erection of the great
pyramid itself, if indeed he did not actually design
it. The epitaph states that he was a priest of Apis
and of Isis. His tomb stood to the south-east of

the great pyramid, and the sarcophagus itself offers
us the most complete model of what one of these
enormous mummy cases was under the early monarchy.
The cover, vaulted in the centre, has on it
an invocation to Anubis. The four sides are modelled
from what was no doubt the form of the ordinary
wooden houses of the period. In the centre is the
doorway, and over it a round log as if for the suspension
of a roller or curtain. All the old tombs have false
doors of this kind evidently imitated from wooden
constructions, and two very complete and large examples
are in the same room. On the cross-bar
the name of the deceased is written generally with
nothing but his name and rank. Possibly in these
old times the great men of Egypt had their names
thus placed over the doors of their houses.

The representations, of which we hear so much, of
agricultural and domestic scenes, are well illustrated
here in a number of bas-reliefs arranged like pictures
round the walls. The sculpture is very good, and by
no means betrays that stiffness we are accustomed to
connect with Egyptian work. We seldom see such
pictures in European museums, and derive our ideas
from copies and casts of the comparatively debased
art of the time of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties
at Thebes. It will be well to keep these two
periods, as remote from our time as they are from
each other, carefully separate in our own minds.

Among the other treasures in this room is a small

sitting statue of an ancient gentleman whose name
was Assa. It is not above three feet high, but delicately
cut in limestone and coloured. Beside Assa
his wife stands, dressed in white, her dress covered
with spots, like what ladies now call “Swiss muslin.”
She places her arm round his neck. Her name is on
the pedestal at her feet. She was a member of the
royal family, and was called Athor-en-Kaoo. Her
little boy stands between his parents, and bears like
his mother the title of “royal cousin.” His name is
Tat-as-as-poo-er. Some Vandal, since this charming
domestic group was in the Museum, has broken off
the head of the child. A statue nearly equal in
delicacy of execution is in the great room, but there
the deceased is represented sitting by himself. Several
groups of a similar antiquity, but not of such a delicate
execution, are in the western chamber; and the
visitor who desires to cultivate a knowledge of hieroglyphs
cannot do better than commence work by
spelling out the epitaphs in these the oldest inscriptions.

Among the most beautiful examples are some
panels of wood. They are carved in delicate relief,
the inscriptions relating to a royal scribe and “trusty
cousin and councillor,” who lived about the time of
Shoofoo. His name, which is very clearly spelled
out in a very archaic but beautiful form of hieroglyphic
writing, seems to have been Hosy. The
panels were inserted in as many of the false portals

of which I have already spoken as being in all these
early tombs.

The finest stone portal is that of Sokar-ka-baoo.
It was evidently erected by his wife, who is represented
on the two outer wings or side posts. She
has a remarkably ugly face, but is very fair, and on
her checks are green marks, which some have accounted
for on the supposition that they were an
early way of denoting grief, and others that the
green stain is caused by the oxidisation of a bronze
plating. over the eyes. Be this as it may, the
mark only occurs on monuments of the highest antiquity.
The lady's name seems naturally to have
been too long for every-day use—Athor-nefer-hotep,
and she had for household convenience a pet name
—Tepes.

Behind a sitting statue of Chafra, one of the nine
found in the tomb near the Sphinx, is another very
old portal of the same character, but smaller. It is
also from a tomb at Sakkara. Its interest lies chiefly
in the fact that Shery, its occupant, served as priest
for the temples attached to the pyramids of two very
ancient kings, one of whom may be identified with
the Sethenes of Manetho and the Senta of the table
of Abood. The name is here spelt Sent. He was
a king of the second dynasty. The other king's name
is unknown in this form. It appears to read Perhebsen,
and may, be the second title of a Pharaoh
known in history by another name.

I have dwelt at some length on these vestiges of
the earliest civilisation, both because of their intrinsic
beauty and because they do not occur even as the
greatest rarities in our European museums. They
belong to a period so remote that it is perfectly futile
to guess at the date. In the long perspective of ages
such minute marks as years can hardly be perceived.
These ancient people tell us little of themselves in
their simple writing. Few grammatical forms appear.
Vowels are almost wholly omitted. But what is
wanting in words is made up for in pictures. Their
daily life is brought before us; their families, their
homes, their professions, their agriculture, their arts;
and we can conjure up, when we know the climate
which they enjoyed and the soil they cultivated, a
very complete picture of what they were, and how
they lived.

The chief thing that strikes us about them, as we
read of them in these monuments, is the absence of
any worship, almost of any mention of their gods.
They are often attached to the service of a king who
is spoken of as a divinity, and in many cases they are
employed in perpetuating that service after his death.
Occasionally a name betrays to us the existence of
a god to whom one of them was specially devoted.
Ptahsokari, Ptah, Athor, Isis, Anubis, Shoo, Ra, Osiris,
are among the names that occur, but none of them
very often. These gods and goddesses were reverenced,
but which of them was thought the greatest,

whether they had any distinct idea of theology,
whether they actually worshipped the king, or Apis,
or the white bull, or the golden hawk, or only looked
upon them as sacred representatives of God, we know
not. The monuments are nearly or altogether silent.
Of Osiris at this time we have but little contemporary
evidence that he was looked upon as the judge of the
dead. Anubis is addressed by Shoofoo-anch as the
god of the under-world. But many of the monuments
of which we have been speaking are much older than
his time—how much older we know not—and in them
there are no such allusions. Investigators are agreed
that pictures or sculptures representing the gods are
all but unknown before the time of the twelfth dynasty.
I say “all but,” as there is a conspicuous but more
than doubtful case to the contrary in the tablet of the
Sphinx. But with regard to their ordinary employments
and daily life we have, as I have said, much
evidence. They lived in timber houses, the windows
of which were small in comparison with the wall
space, and the doorways narrow. Provision was made
everywhere for awnings and curtains to keep out the
midday heat and the midnight cold. Their clothing
was but scanty, but they were careful to cover the
head, either with a kerchief or a wig. The women were
very modestly clad, and wore more than a single garment
—the outer one reaching nearly to the feet. The
hair was plaited, and probably made up with artificial
chignons and cushions, but was tied round the forehead

by a simple riband. Tight-lacing had not been
invented, nor the use of shoes.

In domestic life our ancient Egyptian was a family
man. He loved his wife and his children intensely.
The wife was sometimes the superior of her husband
in rank, and retained her title, as in England we still
distinguish peers' daughters who marry commoners.
She had sometimes private property, and widows were
often women of substance, and raised costly monuments
to the memory of their lords.

This independence of women is often strongly
brought out, and goes to confirm, were other proof
wanting, the assertion of Manetho, that under a king
of the second dynasty “it was decided that women
might hold the imperial government.” Yet the wife,
even the wife of superior rank, is represented as treating
her husband with respect. She usually stands by
his side, or clasps his knees, but often too she also is
seated, and her arm embraces his neck.

These ancient folk were keen sportsmen. In one
picture a widow is represented as enjoying at a little
distance the pleasures of the chase.1 They shot, they
hunted, they fished, they went on the Nile in pleasure
boats, they tamed wild animals, and trained falcons.2

Manetho speaks first of the existence of warfare
when he tells us “the Libyans revolted from the
Egyptians; but, on account of an unexpected increase

of the moon, they surrendered themselves for fear.”
This was under the first king of the third dynasty;
and we have evidence that under the eighth king there
was something resembling a standing army. But up
to this time had the valley been in peace? Had the
civilisation, which is already so great when we first
come upon its vestiges, been permitted to grow up
amid profound quiet, unbroken by foreign invasions or
internecine strife? It is impossible to say that there
was never war, but there is much evidence that long
periods of complete quietness nourished the security
and wealth in which arts are perfected, and the
strongest proof exists that one art at least must have
been brought to a high degree of perfection without
the interference of war.

This is the art of writing. The oldest inscriptions
are those of Maydoom. Yet here we find not a complete
alphabet, but two or three alphabets, and all the
apparatus which in after ages became so like ordinary
writing. But the signs used are signs of peace.
Hieroglyphics and the cartouches of kings have been
compared to heraldry, but there is this very important
difference—for the shields, the lions rampant, the swords
and spear-heads—the whole armoury of heraldry is
warlike and the invention of people engaged in constant
warfare. But what are the oldest hieroglyphic
signs? The first letters of the first inscription I saw
at Maydoom were as follows:—A sickle, a guitar, a
plank, a smoothing-stone, a man's mouth, a ball, an

onion, a zigzag line, a necklace, a foot, a loop of cord
containing a king's name which was spelled with a
bent reed, a guitar, a human mouth, and a partridge.
Such are the hieroglyphic signs of the times. They
show, if we may argue from them at all, that
they were invented by an agricultural and peaceful
people.

Or we may take the ovals of the early kings in
evidence. It is, of course, a question whether the
names of Mena and Teta, and the other kings of the
first dynasty, were ever actually written in their own
day. Still, scarabs occur of such distinctly marked
antiquity, that it has often been supposed they are
the oldest “documents” in Egypt; and they are some-times
inscribed with the cartouches of kings of the
early dynasties. Among the collection of scarabs at
Boolak is one of Seneferoo. I have another, and the
doubtful name of a still older king on a cylinder.

But a glance at the oldest cartouches as they were
written at a later period serves our purpose almost as
well. The name of Mena is spelt with a chess-board
(Men), a zigzag line (N), and a pen or feather (A).
That of his successor Teta consists of two smoothing-stones
(T), and a feather (A). That of Atoth has
a feather (A), a stone (T), and a bulbous-plant (T H).
Ata is spelt with the feather (A), the stone (T), and a
bird (A). The next king has two harrows on his
cartouche, which the learned read as Husapti. It is
not till we get to the eleventh king in the Table of

Abydos that anything that can by any means be
called warlike occurs. Here we have a ram (Ba), a
jar (N), an axe (Neter), and the zigzag N, as before.
An axe is not necessarily warlike, but nothing more
offensive or defensive is in this list till we come down
to the eleventh dynasty.

Such were the people of that remote yet not wholly
prehistoric time. I have avoided all mention of the
question of race because the best authorities are not
agreed about it, or rather, have come to no sufficiently
clear judgment on the subject. But one thing, from
a purely critical point of view, I may be permitted to
say. There is a marked difference in the features of
the great lord who is the king's friend and cousin, and
who sits in the door of his dwelling, represented by
the mouth of his tomb, to receive the homage and
rents of his serfs, and those of the common people who
attend his levée bringing him revenue in kind from his
estates. There is a clear difference between the two
classes as represented on these monuments; no one
can for a moment mistake them. Chafra had a
high Roman nose, so had his cousin Chafra-anch, so
had Assa, so had a round dozen of the great men of
the court of the fourth dynasty. Rahotep had a less
prominent nasal organ, and the same may be said of
Thy, but both were far from exhibiting the type of
the common labourers who surrounded them. It
seems to me, merely using my eyesight, that in this
old time there was in Kam a dominant but benevolent

race of rulers and legislators, and an inferior, downtrodden
subject race, light-hearted, perhaps acquiescing,
as some African races do, in their own subjection,
but of very distinct blood from their masters. All
this, and more, on which it would be easy to enlarge,
may be seen in these marvellous relics of an age so
remote that we cannot date it; relics which show the
signs of long and gradual improvement before they
emerge at all into the light of our modern day.

It is rather strange to observe that no trustworthy
guide, indeed, no guide at all, has been printed, so
far as I am aware, to the choice and arrangement of
a collection of scarabs. The Boolak Museum has
several classified cases of them, and I strongly recommend
them to the attention of visitors who wish
to collect a few genuine specimens. Those which
contain kings' names are labelled, but the rest are
not even catalogued. Still it is well when you have
made your first venture to take your purchases to
the museum and compare them with examples of
whose genuineness there can be no question.

Scarabs seem to have been cast by the mourners
into the open grave, and to have also been strung
with beads in the network which covered a mummy.
It is probable that on the great anniversary of the
dead, the All Souls Day of ancient Egypt, visitors
came provided with appropriately inscribed scarabs
and deposited them in the tombs. Certain it is that
immense numbers have been found. I do not know

whether I heard or read of 3000 being thus distributed
in a single tomb.

Kings' scarabs were perhaps provided by or for
the priest attached to the cult of each monarch's
memory. We meet cartouches of great antiquity upon
them. At the Boolak Museum, for example, the following
kings of the old monarchy (dynasties 1–6) are
represented:—Seneferoo and Nebuka (Mesochris), of
the third dynasty; Menkaoora and Userkaf of the
fourth; Ratatka, Oonas, and Raneferarka, of the fifth:
and there are two examples of Papi, of the sixth
dynasty. Dr. Grant, of Cairo, has very fine examples
of Shoofoo and Chafra, and several other early kings.

In a few months I was able to obtain, by gift or
purchase, examples bearing the ovals of Chafra,
Ranefer.., Oonas (three with two different spellings),
Raenuser, Ramera, Raka.., Ranebtaui, Sebekhotep
V. (two), and many more of later kings, including one
of Rameses in amethyst.

For some reason not very clearly made out, every
second scarab offered to the collector bears the title
of Thothmes III., Ramencheper. Perhaps this king,
as Brugsch asserts, was held in special reverence after
his death. Perhaps the representation of the beetle
(cheper) was thought appropriate on a beetle, and in
favour of this view it may be observed that the oval
of Amenhotep II. (Ra-a-cheperoo), occurs nearly as
often, and that the same “throne-name” was used by
after kings.

At Thebes the next most common inscriptions on
scarabs relate to Amenhotep III. At Goos, in the
same region, I remember to have been offered one
made of mother-of-emerald, bearing that king's name,
Ra-ma-neb.

The gods most often mentioned are Amen and
Ptah. The names sometimes occur alone, but more
often with an addition. A large number of not very
rare examples have the name or emblems of Osiris;
and all, or almost all, the names of the gods are to
be found. Sometimes, too, the inscription records the
devotion of some town or place to a divinity, or the
presentation of some land to a shrine—presumably
by the deceased for whose burial rites the scarab is
designed.
I may take at random a few examples. On one
string I find first, a little delicately-finished coffee-coloured
scarab bearing the words Neferaneb—“good
Lord.” Next the name Oon-nefer, a title of Osiris.
Then the name of a “Royal scribe,” on a green
scarab of very good and probably very early workmanship.
Then a little green stone bearing the words
Ra se—“son of the Sun.” Then a white scarab of a
very common type, Nefer-ma-neb—the “good Lord of
Justice.” Then a blue highly enamelled example
bearing the bee, or seket, emblematical of Egypt.
Then a yellow one with the name Amen-neb, a blue
one with a lotus flower; three, very small and delicately
cut, with the words suten-rech—“cousin of the

King,” and lastly—besides many which surpass my
scholarship—a pale-green scarab with a sitting figure
of Osiris on it and the words “good Lord.”

Such are a few of the ordinary inscriptions, but the
variety is almost infinite. Sometimes the people
bring you many examples closely resembling each
other, all made about the same time. This is probably
caused by the opening of some tomb containing
a great number of a single period. Sebekhotep
V. Ra-nefer-cha, is so far a rare scarab that it
does not occur among those at Boolak; yet I was
offered four examples in a week.

In spite of the number of old scarabs in existence
a large and very thriving trade in imitations is carried
on. Nothing but actual knowledge and comparison
will enable the collector to distinguish the genuine
from the imitations, and no hard and fast rules can be
given to which exceptions may not be found. The
oldest often look the freshest. The figures are cut to a
uniform but generally very slight depth, and the form
of the signs is very delicate. Scratchy-looking inscriptions
are either forgeries or belong to a late period.
The oldest scarabs are often made of white stone, but
generally of earthenware glazed; often of the most
beautiful blue. There is an old green which looks as
if it had been painted on a white ground and half
rubbed off. Sometimes the colour, generally a dark-blue,
appears to be all through the paste. Ivory
scarabs are rare and should never be passed, but a

number of forgeries in this material are in the market.
Large granite scarabs seldom have inscriptions, but I
have seen several on which an inscription had been
very well copied by a modern hand. It is very hard
to detect these frauds unless you have a smattering of
hieroglyphic knowledge. Of course, if you have, you
may be sure that when an inscription will not read it
must be false.

The Luxor forgeries are the best, the hieroglyphics
being very deceptively copied. The glaze, however,
betrays itself, and the collector should look cautiously
at a kind of tortoiseshell green, which is the nearest
thing they can make there to the genuine turquoise.
It is very seldom, too, that the inscription is cut
uniformly.

Another and large class of forged scarabs is known
by its dirty-grey colour, and a splitty look in the
glaze. They are chiefly offered for sale at Cairo; I
have seen several hundreds in one shop in the bazaar,
and have reason to believe that in many cases the
dealers are themselves taken in.

A few ancient scarabs occur covered with gold—
sometimes the gold is so thick as to form a perfect
cast, and occasionally you may find this gold case
alone.

The Arabs of the Pyramids do a great trade
in genuine scarabs, which they import from other
places, and sell on the spot. One franc is a sufficient
price for an ordinary example uninscribed, or

only bearing the name of Amen-Ra or Thothmes
III., but for well-coloured specimens and for old
kings' names, a higher price is asked, even a napoleon,
or £1, being sometimes demanded, and not
unfrequently paid by enthusiastic collectors. Before
you give so much you should borrow the scarab for a
day and obtain warranty for its genuineness from a
good judge.

PAVILION OF A MOSQUE.

How English Tourists see the Pyramids—The Great Time-passage
Theory—The True History of Pyramids—A List of Pyramids
from the Papyrus—Their Identification—Pyramids now remaining—
Their Comparative Heights—The Riddle of the Sphinx unsolved—
The Question of the Tablet—Its Want of Authority—The Use of
the Sphinx in Hieroglyphs—The Table of Thothmes—Description
from Charlotte Brontë—An Irreverent Sightseer.

DASHOOR.

IT is only after repeated inspection that an adequate
idea is obtained of the so-called Pyramid-field. Familiarity
brings the most wonderful sights into their
proper perspective. After a third or fourth visit, the
bigness of the Pyramid of Shoofoo no longer weighs
upon the mind, the height of the Pyramid of Chafra

no longer overshadows it; the whole platform begins
to assume its true aspect. It is the Kensal Green of
Memphis. The traveller who comes to Egypt with
a preformed theory about the Great Pyramid and its
purpose, and who canters out from Cairo on a glaring
day, is dragged up to the top, hustled through passages
of the diameter of a gas-pipe, alternately exposed
to the brightest sunshine and the blackest
darkness, who is next hurried down across the hot
sand to stare at the Sphinx, and finally chased
through the dust by a yelling donkey-boy the long
seven miles back to Cairo, supposes he has thoroughly
“done” the whole thing. He fondly imagines that in
all his after-life he will be an authority on Pyramids,
and will be capable, in the home circle, if not in a
wider sphere, of giving a valuable opinion on the
theory of Mr. Taylor and Mr. Smyth. One need
not be surprised if he pronounces strongly in its
favour. The performance he has gone through is
calculated alike to fatigue his body and confuse his
mind. His attention has been wholly concentrated
on the Great Pyramid. Its height, its rugged stones,
the vociferations of the Arab guides, the giddiness
which the steep slope or the sun's rays induced when
he was on the summit, the broken shin acquired in
the exploration of the interior, the temporary blindness
after he came out, the grand chorus of backsheesh
which signalised his departure, and a thousand other
impressions equally vivid, mingle admirably with the

ignorance or prejudice he brought out, and conduce
to the formation of what he boasts is a cool and unwarped
opinion. He has certainly seen something,
superficially, of one Pyramid; but what did he see of
the nine or ten which are near it, of the fifty-nine
which are further off? He has not read, supposing
he could read, a single hieroglyph. He has not the
vaguest knowledge of early Egyptian history. He
is perfectly certain that the world was created B C.
4004, and believes that the odd four years were part
of the original revelation. He has probably never
heard of Lepsius, certainly never of Lieblein. He
is not acquainted with the name of a single Pyramid,
and has no more knowledge of the table of Sakkara,
or the table of Abydos, than of the Turin papyrus.
He considers it best to keep his mind free and unfettered,
and is all the more positive as to what he
imagines he does know. The man who, after a personal
visit to the cemetery of Gheezeh, can continue
in the nurture and admonition of those who believe
in the Sacred Cubit, the Time-passage theory, the
Meteorological theory, or any other tenet of the
sect of which Mr. Smyth is presumably the prophet,
must have been convinced on evidence very different
from the evidence of the senses. I should be sorry
to disturb a faith which is so wholly ethereal that it
is independent of facts, and whose votaries are as
much beyond the influence of argument as of plain
proof.

Rightly understood, a Pyramid is neither more
nor less than a cairn. It grew up from a cairn,
and it was resolved into a cairn again. When it
first emerges on the stage of history it is sufficiently
rude and incomplete. If antiquaries are right in
ascribing the Pyramid in steps at Sakkara to Vanephes,
a king of the first dynasty, this is by far the
oldest building in the world; but, in spite of some
recent assertions to the effect that his name has been
found in it, the point is more than doubtful. Vanephes
lived at least as long before Shoofoo as William
the Conqueror lived before Queen Anne. It is certainly
recorded by Manetho that he built Pyramids;
and, further, that they were situated at a place
called Kochome, which M. Brugsch identifies with
the northern part of the cemetery of Sakkara. Many
heaps, more or less well defined, exist here, and any
of them may be the Pyramids of Vanephes as well
as the Pyramid in steps. There is an irreconcilable
discrepancy between the two passages of Manetho in
which, under the name of Vanephes, he speaks of
the first Pyramids, and under Kaiechos, more than a
century later, of the first setting-up of the sacred
bulls, if this Pyramid was built, as has sometimes
been supposed, for an Apis mausoleum. In fact, it
differs so much, with its two entrances, its thirty
chambers, but chiefly in its not facing the points of
the compass, from all the seventy Pyramids found
here and elsewhere, that it must be looked upon as

belonging to a wholly different class from the ordinary
funeral monuments of kings. If the votaries of
the Pyramid religion want a building which may
perhaps not be a tomb, and which may have been
built with a theological object, or as a record of faith
for the benefit of posterity, let them turn to this remarkable
and anomalous heap of stones. It will
answer their purposes far better than one among a
well-defined class of unquestionably sepulchral cairns.
All the Pyramids except this one face the four cardinal
points of the compass; all have their entrance
on the north side; all contain provision for a single
king's burial. Many are identified with the names of
kings of whom it is recorded that they did build
Pyramids in various places; and the Great Pyramid
is, without any doubt which a reasonable man can
entertain, the burial mound of one of a long line of
kings who all erected similar mounds.

In the lists it is not even distinguished by a name
differing in character from the others. If we identify
it, as we may very safely do, with Shoofoo, the second
king of the fourth dynasty, and therefore the third king,
possibly the fourth, who built a Pyramid, or Pyramids,
we find that it was only called the “Splendid,”
while to the Pyramid of Chafra is given the name of
the “Great.” To make more of it than a mausoleum,
a royal “folly,” involves making something at least of
the Pyramids which succeeded it, and a great deal
of those which preceded it. It happens to be the

broadest, if not the highest, of those in the same
group; it is by far the most conspicuous, owing to
its situation on a corner of the plateau and in
advance of its companions, so that the visitor from
Cairo recognises it—
long before he sees any other. As we shall observe
when we come to speak of Maydoom, the great
building in stages which the Arabs name “Haram el
Kedab” is even more imposing, no doubt on account
of its lonely situation, and the absence of smaller
monuments by which to measure it. Though it stands
on no such elevated platform as that of Gheezeh,
and though it rises but 122 feet above the heap of
débris which surrounds it, yet it is only by actual
measurement that one is convinced that it does not
surpass, nay, does not equal, in dimensions at least,
the Pyramid of Menkaoora, the third in size among
the so-called Great Pyramids.

The tomb of Shoofoo has, therefore, an adventitious
advantage enjoyed by few of its neighbours in being
the first we see, as well as really the largest. To this
fact, almost as much as to its actual size, we must
attribute the effect it produces on the minds of people
who have never seen a Pyramid before. In truth, to
the superficial observer it appears to hide all other
Pyramids, and it is not until a second or third visit
that he perceives that it is at present only a foot

higher in actual masonry, and considerably lower in
real height above the level of the river, than the
adjoining Pyramid of Chafra. Had Chafra's Pyramid
been at the edge of the platform, had it been the first
seen by the visitor, and had the true relative proportions
of the two been unknown, it may safely be
questioned whether the Pyramid of Shoofoo would
have become a subject of so much industrious, if
futile, speculation. In the researches of early investigators
this is very apparent. Champollion, for
example, only examined one tomb in the whole
necropolis, and Rosellini the same. All attention
was engrossed by the monument of Shoofoo. It
was reserved for Justus Lepsius to examine eighty
tombs here, and to find the remains of no less than
sixty-seven Pyramids.

The word “Pyramid” has been a matter of considerable
questioning among antiquaries. A great
authority derives it from the ancient Egyptian form
Abumer, a great tomb, of which the Greeks transposed
the syllables, just as they turned Hor-em-Khoo, the
title of the Sphinx, into Armachis, and Sestura into
Sesostris. This is more than plausible; but the name
has also been derived from Pi-Rama, the mountain,
and, as if to give Mr. Smyth the shadow of an excuse,
from puros, wheat, and metron, a measure. So, too,
pur, fire, and puramis, a pointed cake, have been
suggested, and a hieroglyphic expression has been
read, or attempted to be read, as br—br. We cannot

so far, however, say for certain whether the Egyptians
of the ancient Empire had any general name for such
buildings, though every king's tomb had its own title,
and in the picture-writing a triangle represented, as
determinative, all kinds of royal burial places, whether,
like the grave of Oonas, they were merely square platforms
or, like the southernmost monument at Dashoor,
were almost dome-shaped. Upwards of twenty of
these titles are found in the printed list of Lieblein,
the Norwegian antiquary. They all betray the unbounded
admiration in which each king held his own
last resting-place, and illustrate remarkably the real
nature of the Egyptian faith in a life, not beyond, so
much as actually in, the grave.

This is amply proved by the following list which
gives nearly all the names known. It was originally
compiled by the indefatigable Lieblein, but has been
increased in late years:—

Tat-setoo, “the most abiding place,” Teta, I, vi.

The following have been identified:—the Pyramid
of Seneferoo at Maydoom, those of Shoofoo, Chafra,
Menkaoora, and Hentsen, a daughter of Shoofoo,
at Gheezeh: those of Sahoora and Raenuser, at
Abooseer; and the Mastábat el Faroon of Oonas;
but it is known that the Pyramids of Vanephes and
Menkaoohor were at Sakkara, while those of Amenemhat
and Usertasen, the founders of the Labyrinth,
must be identified with the two Pyramids of Illahoon
and Howara.

Pyramids, or the remains of them, exist at or near
a large number of villages which must nearly all be
on some part of the site, or in the immediate suburbs,
of Mennefer. The most northern are those of Aboo
Roash, where one may be clearly made out. At
Kafr are the so-called Pyramids of Gheezeh, nine in
number, possibly ten. At Zowyet there is one: at
Rigga a mere heap, at Abooseer, four, and some
nearly obliterated remains; at Sakkara, nine clearly
distinguishable. There are five at Dashoor, of which
two are larger than the third Pyramid at Gheezeh

There are two shapeless heaps, probably once Pyramids,
at Lisht, and the brick Pyramids on the site
of the Labyrinth are one at Illahoon, one at Howara,
and two at Biahmoo. Besides these there is the
Mastábat el Faroon between Sakkara and Dashoor,
and the three-staged tomb of Seneferoo at Maydoom.

The following are the heights in feet of the principal Pyramids:—Gheezeh, Shoofoo, 460; Chafra,
447; Menkaoora, 203; Sakkara, Pyramid in steps,
190; Dashoor, 326 and 321; and Maydoom, 122,
above the mound which surrounds its base. The
original heights have been estimated as follows:—
Shoofoo, 482 feet; Chafra, 454; Dashoor, 342 and
335; Menkaoora, 218; Sakkara, 200; and the now
ruined pyramid of Abooseer, 228.

To resume: Seneferoo, it will have been seen, called
his Pyramid “the Crown”; that of Asseskef is
“Refreshment”; that of Papi, the “Lovely Place,”
a name identical with the name of Memphis itself.
Teta, perhaps playing on his own name, called his
Pyramid Tat-setoo, “the Most Abiding of Places.”
Others are the “Rising of the Soul,” the “Most
Holy Place,” the “Good Rising,” the “Beautiful,”
the “Great and Fair,” the “Pure Place,” the “Place
of Rest”; while the monument, already mentioned,
of Oonas, which the Arabs call the Mastábat el
Pharoon, is described as the “Best Place”; and the
unidentified tomb of Neferkara as the “Abode of
Life.” Such are the evidences, among others, that

to the men of that remote time—a time variously
estimated as seven, six, and five thousand years
ago—death was not looked upon with the horror
which in later ages invested the grave with ideas of
gloom, and recorded rather the despair of mourners
than the rest of the departed.

Near each Pyramid was the temple consecrated to
the worship, or at least the honour, of the sleeping
divinity of the Pharaoh. The foundations are still
visible of such temples near the Pyramids of Chafra,
Menkaoora, and Raenuser. Even in the days of the
Ptolemies the endowments which some of the oldest
kings had conferred upon the priests of their shrines
continued to enrich officials who, after the lapse of
some four thousand years, perhaps enjoyed sinecures.

No writing or sculpture remains on any Pyramid.
Herodotus tells us of the hieroglyphs on the Pyramid
of Shoofoo. He curiously observes that they give the
sum expended in supplying the workmen with onions
and garlic; a statement on which I have ventured
to hazard the conjecture, more than probable in itself,
that the king's titles as lord of Upper and Lower
Egypt were engraved with the lotus, the papyrus,
and the bulbous plant, which in other places enter so
largely into similar inscriptions.

Historically speaking, the Pyramids, apart from
their antiquity, are of the highest interest. They
represent a time of profound peace. They point to
the existence of a dominant race, and of a population

which could be called on for unlimited labour. They
tell us little of the finer arts, in sculpture and painting,
which even then flourished, but much of skill in
engineering, quarrying, building, as distinguished from
architecture, and all that could be done by mere
multitudes working together and bringing brute force
to bear on stubborn materials. Whatever of higher
art those early kings lavished on their “fair resting-places,”
whatever of portraiture and painting, of gold
and jewels, of carving and ornament, of epitaphs and
funeral odes they could command, were bestowed on
the temple; the tomb itself was vast, solid, enduring,
nor is it at all certain that the actual burial-place of
Shoofoo or Chafra has been reached and rifled. Those
who have spent most time in searching through
the labyrinths of the interior are of opinion that the
two great Pyramids are still but half explored. It
may be that these old kings still

The coffin of Menkaoora is in the British Museum,
and his name is on it, but there are doubts and
difficulties with regard to the third Pyramid, on
which I have no intention of touching here, There,

is a possibility, at least, that it is not the coffin of
Mycerinus, but that of another king—perhaps not a
king, but a queen,
who knows? And perhaps Menkaoora is yet sleeping
in quiet “in his own house.”

In the aftertime, when the kings of the twelfth
dynasty fought against the northern strangers, when
Aahmes led his people against the Shepherds, when
Seti I. subdued the Hittites and his grandson pursued
Israel, when fortresses and treasure cities, Pi-Tum and
Rameses, had to be built on the border, we no longer
hear of such great cairns as the Pyramids. The
tombs in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, great as
they are, required rather skilled labour than mere
force. No vast multitude was needed to decorate
them in beaten gold and glorious red. The peaceful
artist and his staff worked quietly in the dark
corridors, while the people whose ancestors had
heaped up the tombs of the older Pharaohs, now
followed the later Pharaohs to the battle-field.

A smaller waste of human life than that by which
Bonaparte ruined France would have built him a
pyramid greater than Shoofoo's. About half the sum
lavished by Ismail Pasha on plastered palaces would
have made him a monument more enduring than
Chafra's. But the Pyramid-builders had neither
enemies abroad nor rivals at home.

A comparison of the different Pyramid-fields, and
a little research into documentary evidence about
them, bring out one fact very clearly in opposition to
many recent theorists. The dynasties under which
they were erected were successive, not contemporaneous.
It was not as their rivals, but as their
successors, that the kings of the fourth dynasty made
their tombs beside those of the third, and the
kings of the sixth dynasty beside those of the fifth.
The last Amenemhat of the twelfth dynasty was
probably descended from Seneferoo, possibly from
Vanephes, with as much directness as Queen
Victoria from our Angevin Kings, or from the early
Athelings of Wessex.

Next in interest at Gheezeh to the Pyramids is the
Sphinx. About it, too, a great deal of nonsense has
been written; and I am afraid many people will think
I am adding to it in giving my reasons for doubting
the remote antiquity of the figure. I am convinced
that in its present form it dates from the reign of one
of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty—an origin old
enough, but a third less than that of the Pyramids.

To different people the name of the Sphinx
conveys very different impressions. To some it is
the graceful Greek ornament, the lovely woman's
face, the greyhound's body, the lion's claws. To
others it suggests the myth of Œdipus, and, as a
corollary, the reflection that people “gave up” very
easy conundrums in those days. To others, again, the

Sphinx is part of the great “Time-passage Theory,”
and a convincing proof that the Pyramids are a
petrifaction of all the great truths of revealed religion.
But to any one who has climbed the hill to the
cemetery of Ghizeh, and walked across a slope of
blazing sand to get under the shadow of the Sphinx
for an instant's respite from the heat, it is a mighty
fact, standing wholly by itself, unconnected with any
other sphinx, not even the image of a god, but the
god himself. The ancient Egyptians called him “neb,”
lord—a name applied generally to all the gods in
their populous pantheon, but specially to the Sphinx
alone. In his present condition he is a ball of stone
rising on a neck some forty feet above the sand. The
features he once had, features variously described as
terrible, beautiful, hideous, expressionless, mocking,
and so forth, are now chiefly to be made out by a
process of the imagination, though red paint still
marks the eyebrows, and there is the trace of a blush
on the right cheek. At midday his shadow falls only
under the deep chin, whose beard, long shorn by the
Arabs, is now in the British Museum. As you creep
under it you observe the stratification of the stone,
and perceive that the Sphinx was never brought
there, but grew where he is. The second Pyramid is
immediately behind him and square with him, or
nearly so, as if they had some connection one with
the other. If you take the two into the same view,
you will be puzzled by the nearness of the Pyramid,

which in the clear desert air seems close against the
Sphinx. If Thothmes IV. made the Sphinx, it can
have no connexion with the Pyramid; for Thothmes
was of the eighteenth dynasty, and the Pyramid
builders were of the fourth.

The discovery of a tablet purporting to be a record
made by Shoofoo was supposed for a time to set the
question at rest. It was found built into a wall
near the most southern of the three small Pyramids,
which are, so to speak, satellites to that of Shoofoo.
It is rectangular and has a heavy border, the whole
border and a kind of base being covered with hiero-glyphs.
It is almost impossible to read a considerable
part of them, for, not only are they very indistinctly
cut, but the stone itself is bad. The part within
the border or frame contains pictures, very roughly
executed, of a number of gods and goddesses, among
them a Sphinx, and a little inscription is over each
figure. Chem, Anubis, another dog-headed god,
perhaps Tap-heroo of Ssoot, Horus, Thoth, several
forms of Isis and Athor, Osiris, the bull Apis,
Nepthys, Selk, the youthful Horus, the triumphant
Horus, Ptah, Pasht, Toom, the setting sun, represented
by his proper emblems, and finally the Sphinx,
all are figured in this table, which, if it is contemporary,
would be almost conclusive as to the worship
of the ancients.

But is it contemporary—that is to say, was it
written in the time of Shoofoo?

To this question I think but one answer can be
returned—it is not. An expert in writing has no
difficulty whatever in distinguishing between the
pages of two mediæval manuscripts written, say, in
the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. He cannot
perhaps tell what the differences are, but he can have
no hesitation in making his decision. It is just the
same with hieroglyphics. No one who has seen the
“Tomb of Numbers,” with the long inscriptions commemorating
the riches of Chafra-anch, or the tombs
of Apa, of Ata, of Asseskef-anch, or of any other
of the many containing writing which lie scattered
so thickly over the Pyramid hill, can have a moment's
hesitation in saying the “stela of the Sphinx” was
not cut in the reign of Shoofoo, not even in the
reigns of any of his successors down to the end of
the Ancient Monarchy.

The question as to its age has been variously
answered—one of the best authorities attributing it to
the time of the twenty-sixth dynasty. I cannot but
think it is older, as even a forger of that period, in
making so long a list of gods, would not have omitted
Amen.1 The worship of Amen was introduced, in
all probability, under the later kings of the eleventh
dynasty.

What this stela says about the Sphinx has been
often quoted, and may be found at some length in
the Boolak Catalogue. “The place of the Sphinx of

Hor-em-Khoo is to the south of the temple of Isis.
.... The paintings of the god Hor-em-Khoo are
conformed to the specifications.”

On this M. Mariette makes the following curious
remark — I quote again from the Catalogue:—
“Whether the stone be contemporary with Cheops
(which is admitted to be doubtful), or whether it
belongs to a later age, it is not the less certain that
Cheops restored a temple already existing,” &c.

Herr Brugsch, in his History, makes a similar observation:
—” Although the monument … is not
contemporary with the time of Khufu (Shoofoo),
and dates from a later epoch in the history of
Egypt, nevertheless this witness of antiquity loses
nothing of its historical value.”

Now, to the ordinary mind the conclusion would
be precisely the reverse. If the stone is not contemporary,
and it certainly is not, it is altogether and all
the more, and that much the more, uncertain that
Cheops1 restored a temple and the Sphinx.

It is of course possible that the inscription may be
a copy of an older one, but that possibility does not
give it authority. We all know what restorers have
done in falsifying records in our own day. No one
would think of arguing from a modern carving “in
the style of the fourteenth century” as to a carving
actually of the fourteenth century. And until we

can find some portion, be it never so small, of the
original inscription, this stela is absolutely without
authority as contemporary evidence. A forged
scarab is often an accurate copy of a genuine
original. But unless you know of the existence of
the genuine original, you would throw aside the most
interesting inscription on the forgery.

It is almost useless to conjecture what the original
of this stela was. Perhaps the copier, having a certain
space to fill, put in all the gods and goddesses
he knew of, and where Hor-em-Khoo was mentioned,
added a picture of the Sphinx of his own mere
motion. The picture of a Sphinx had become the
hieroglyphic determinative of Hor-em-Khoo, when
the stela was cut. There are plenty of theories which
will account for the existence of this record, and for
its peculiarities, but until we have some corroboration
of its statements from other monuments, they must
be received with caution, if not actually rejected.

So far, then, as we can tell, the Sphinx was in existence
in the time of Thothmes IV., and perhaps earlier.
The authority of the granite tablet between the forepaws
of the great figure is unquestionable: “The
majesty of the God, Hor-em-Khoo, speaks with his
own mouth as a father would speak with his son,
while he says, Look at me, my beloved son;
Thothmes, I am thy Father!”

The use of the figure of a Sphinx in hieroglyphic
inscriptions is found for the first time, if we except the

forged stela, in the jewellery of Queen Aah-hotep in
the Boolak Museum, where it occurs in connection
with the cartouche of King Ahmes, the grandfather of
Thothmes III. From that time on it is of common
occurrence, and both on obelisks and on scarabs King
Thothmes is represented as a Sphinx.

One consideration must be taken into the account
in estimating the antiquity of the Sphinx. He is
carved out of the natural rock, and stands on no
pedestal, but springs directly out of the ground. If
we endeavour to picture to ourselves the appearance
of the plateau of the Pyramids before any tombs
were placed upon it we can have little difficulty in the
task. Many similar platforms exist all along the Nile
in Lower Egypt. There is a broad expanse of black
alluvial soil, dotted with occasional palms, and green
here and there with corn or clover. Beyond the reach
of the inundation rises a wall of stone, thirty, forty,
perhaps fifty feet above the lower level. The top is
flat, and covered with loose sand, which blows over
on the fields below at every storm. Behind is yet
another ridge of higher rocks, and a third step may
be still further. On the intermediate level the Pyramids
are placed. But if we follow the track of the
first Pharaoh who came up from Memphis to find a
suitable place for his tomb, threading his way by the
side of the Nile, through the network of canals,
towards a hollow in the long line of low cliffs, the first
object which would meet his eye, standing up by itself

out of the sand-drift, half-way on the slope between
the lower and the higher platforms, would be a great
mass or column of rock some sixty or seventy feet in
height, and backed by a low ridge running for a
couple of hundred feet towards the face of the hill.
Such isolated rocks are common in Egypt. One of
them stands to the Pyramid of Dashoor just as the
Sphinx stands to the Pyramid of Chafra. The rock
may have already appeared to bear the semblance of
a human face. But it could not be overlooked. The
first rays of the morning sun would strike it, and the
Sphinx, it is very possible, may have been rough
hewn by the earliest occupiers of the tombs of the
ancient Empire.

A great deal of sentimental rubbish has been
written about the Father of Horror, as I have heard
the Arabs call him; but he is very impressive. It is
impossible to think of him except as an individual, a
person, not a block of stone. I remember at one of
my visits a member of the party pulled out a note-book
and read a passage from Charlotte Brontë's preface
to her sister's novel, Wuthering Heights, where
she speaks of her creation of the character of Heathfield
in words which with slight change describe the
maker of the Sphinx. His work was “hewn in a wild
workshop, with simple tools out of simple materials.”
He found the block of sandstone in the solitary desert,
and, “gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag
might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a

form moulded with at least one element of grandeur
—power. He wrought with a rude chisel and from
no model but the vision of his meditations. With
time and labour the crag took human shape; and
there it stands, colossal, dark, and frowning, half
statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and
goblin-like, in the latter almost beautiful.” But the
concluding lines of Currer Bell's wonderful picture do
not apply to the Sphinx; though its colouring is “of
mellow gray,” no moorland moss clothes it; no
“heath, with blooming bells and balmy fragrance,
grows faithfully close to the giant's foot”; an Arab
sits astride on the ear and offers to chop a large piece
out of the eyeball for you for half a franc, or a small
piece for a piastre.

My sentiment received a rude shock another day.
I remarked to an American friend that the Sphinx
grew upon me. “Well,” he replied, mockingly, “I'm
glad it doesn't grow on me. It's too heavy.”

The Chains of Egypt—Nicopolis, the Roman Camp at Ramleh—
Turkish demolitions—El Kab—Dakkeh—Kasr e' Shemma—The
Churches—The Walls—Comparison with the Walls of London.

THE LAST OF NICOPOLIS.

IN a country which has been compared for its
length without breadth to a serpent, the government
which holds the neck controls it all. When all the
world except Egypt was sunk in barbarism, the
throat of the Nile Valley was at the southern end;
the savages of Ethiopia were nearer and more
dangerous than the savages of Syria, or Greece, or

Italy. In days so far gone by that their exact
date is a matter of conjecture, or at best of approximation
only, to secure the peace of the country it
was needful to garrison Nubia. In less remote
times the other end of the vast length must be
guarded and protected. Accordingly, we find that
when the strong-minded lady who raised the great
obelisk of Karnac to the memory of her father
Thothmes sought to hold the whole valley in subjection,
she made her fortress beyond the First
Cataract. When Cambyses, or one of his Persian
successors, sought to hold the Delta, he placed his
garrison at Fostat between Memphis and its sources
of supply. When the Cæsars ruled Egypt from
beyond the Mediterranean, they fortified their camp
on the highest ground within reach of Alexandria.
The chains of Greece were said by the last Philip
to be Corinth and Chalcis and Demetrias; but the
chains of Egypt were Nicopolis and Babloon and
Dakkeh; yet of the three only the oldest is left.

Babloon was replaced under the Romans by a
building of great antiquarian interest, though comparatively
so modern; and of the camp at Ramleh
it may be said, as of a camp nearer home which
bore the same name, that within a very few years it
has disappeared. The walls had seen, in all probability,
the defeat of Anthony's last army. Augustus
himself had encamped on the spot; and here, just
seventy-seven years ago, Sir Ralph Abercromby

“fell in the arms of victory.” In order to
build one of his numerous and ephemeral palaces,
the Khedive, in spite of many appeals, and in
contempt of many promises, pulled away almost
all that remained of the old walls, and suffered a
tesselated pavement to fall to pieces and disappear
through mere carelessness and neglect. Strange to
say, like the fabled apple of Sodom, he never enjoyed
it. A few days, or weeks, after it was finished, and
before the Viceroy himself had been able to visit it,
his little daughter died in the new palace, and, though
on one or two occasions balls have been given there
for Alexandrian folk, the Khedive has never slept a
night in it. All that now remains of Nicopolis is a
single column on a cliff overhanging the sea; though
a few years ago a dozen were standing, it is easy to
see that a few months hence even this one will
have fallen.

The present dynasty, in an age of lath and plaster,
will have left some great public works complete, and
more begun; but it has not failed to mark its power
by a large number of demolitions, of which this is
only a specimen. Under Mehemet Ali the hall
erected by Saladin in the citadel was removed, with
its two-and-thirty columns of rose granite. In 1822
the temple of Elephantine was destroyed in order
to build a palace for the Governor of Assouan with
the materials. It need hardly be said that the
palace was never built; but of the temple only

single granite doorway is left. In Cairo itself, while
a vast and hideous mosque of modern Greek design
is gradually creeping up on one side of the street,
in honour of the Sheykh who founded the Roofayeh
order of Dervishes, and to mark the burial-place of
the child that died at Ramleh; on the other the
beautiful mosque of Sultan Hassan—a building contemporary
with our Westminster Abbey, and in
many respects comparable with it—is falling into
irreparable decay. It must be allowed that, under
the present ruler, the antiquities of Egypt have been
made subjects of Government solicitude; and the
researches of M. Mariette and his fellow-labourers
have become possible. But, comparatively modern
as the Roman and Arab remains appear, they are
sometimes quite as interesting to the student as the
older works, though so far they have excited little
interest, and some of them are but seldom visited.

The old walls of El Kab, a fortress of the thirteenth
dynasty, about fifty miles south of Luxor, the curious
forts hereafter described,1 at Arabat-el-Madfooneh,
and the fort of Dakkeh, all present the same characteristics;
but that of Dakkeh, both from its situation
on the southern border, and its comparative state of
preservation, is the most interesting. It is strangely
like another type of military architecture with which
we are familiar in England. The voyager who
ascends beyond the First Cataract finds himself in

a narrow valley shut in by granite hills, and only
sees here and there a space wide enough for cultivation.
There are buildings of all ages and kinds,
chiefly temples; and at intervals, where the sandstone
ridges approach the Nile, he finds vast grottoes
carved in the face of the cliff, the greatest of all
being the farthest—namely, the temple of the Sun
at Aboshek, better known as Ipsambool. Amid this
wealth of architectural remains, the best of them
on the western bank, the castle opposite Dakkeh,
on the eastern bank, is very often passed by unvisited.
Yet it well repays a visit, though the visitor
wishes in vain for some one competent to describe the
defences as Mr. Clark would describe a Norman Keep
in England. For, though it is built of crude brick—
that is to say, of mud—and though it is seven hundred
miles from the sea, and though it is one of the
oldest buildings in the world, having been erected
2,500 years at least before the White Tower, yet to
the eyes of an English traveller it resembles nothing
in the world so much as the Keep of Rochester or of
Guildford. There is the ditch, with scarp and counterscarp.
There are square towers overlapping the
corners. There are flat buttresses not reaching the
top of the wall. There are gates with narrow walls
and signs of drawbridges. There is a covered way
down to the water's edge. We might be exploring
a castle on the Thames or the Dee, except for the
material of which it is built. The walls, some fourteen

feet thick at least, and still in places not less
than forty in height, are all formed of great blocks of
sun-dried mud, very like the sods of peat one sees in
Scotland or Ireland. Here and there the impress of
the maker's hand may be found, and you may lay
your fingers into the very marks left by a man of
flesh and blood, of nerves and muscles, of skin with a
thousand delicate lines such as you see in your own
palm, yet who lived and laboured and died more than
three thousand years ago. Some of the marks are
small, and must be those of a woman's hand; for
female labour, by which to-day the new streets of
Cairo are built, was, no doubt, the rule in Egypt
under Hatasoo as it is under Ismael. It is very
possible that the “prehistoric” Lake-dwellers whose
hands were lately found impressed on pottery in
Switzerland, did not live at so remote a period as
these oppressed Nubians of three thousand years
ago. Of the history of the fortress opposite Dakkeh,
of its very name, we know nothing. Centuries before
Joseph or Moses, centuries before the siege of
Troy, tens of centuries before William the Norman,
monarchs had castles built for them, and employed
the labour of their subjects to forge and strengthen
their own chains.

The ride to Kasr el Shama takes the sightseer
through a labyrinth of small streets to the southern
gate of Cairo, named after the lady Zeynab, or
Zenobia, a grand-daughter of the Prophet, and thence

over immense heaps of rubbish, the ashes of Fostat,
burnt in 1168, until the open country is reached. The
mounds on the left are of amazing size. Nothing is
more difficult to believe than that they are wholly
artificial. Yet it cannot be doubted, and no digger
into them has come to anything more solid than an
occasional stone wall.

Expeditions to hunt in the mounds are sometimes
made by the English residents—not to hunt wild
beasts, or creeping things, but to search for old Arab
beads and beautifully coloured fragments of pottery.
Many interesting objects have been found in this
way. You do not dig, but simply walk over the
mound, and pick up what you find on the surface.
Every wind lays bare a fresh stratum, every shower
washes the dust from the glass or pottery; and you
may search in the same place time after time, almost
day after day, and always find something more. One
hillock abounds in beautiful beads. Perhaps it marks
the site of the bead bazaar of Fostat. As Fostat was
burnt in the twelfth century, most of the things thus
found date from beyond six hundred years ago.

Behind these mounds, and extending in a continuous
belt along the foot of the mountain between it and
Cairo, is the ancient Arab cemetery. It is interrupted
where the approaches of the Citadel reach down to
the city. Some of the tombs, especially those erected
by the Mameluke kings, are well worthy of a visit;
the burial-place of the present dynasty being

conspicuous among so many beautiful minarets
and mosques by a dome of black iron set crooked
on a whitewashed wall.

Keeping well to the right, we avoid these sepulchres,
but pass the European burial-grounds; that in which
many English travellers are laid is very well kept and
shaded with a number of fine trees, especially funereal
cypresses. The wall round it is high, and it has a
strange—I had almost said a pre-Raphaelite—look,
reminding one of the old Campo Santo pictures in
Italy, or the conventional pictures of a walled garden
in a manuscript of Chaucer or Froissart.

The heaps extend for miles in a southerly direction,
and may mark the site of cities older by far than the
tabernacles which Amer pitched on the spot in 638,
and which supply a meaning for the Arabic name.
This was Babylon, not indeed Babylon the Great, but
the town which Cambyses is said to have founded,
and whence, according to some, the Epistle of St.
Peter was written. Whether Strabo, when he speaks
of a Babylonian colony here, refers to the extradition
of a number of families by the Persian king, or
whether, as his words seem to imply, a much older
settlement is described, cannot now be decided. In
the twenty-sixth Dynasty there was a town here. It is
curious, however, to note that other authors have
spoken of the colony in very similar terms, and that
it is sometimes ascribed to “Sesostris,” or Rameses
II., who is here said to have placed his captives from

Babylon, and sometimes to Semiramis. The most
recent writer who has touched on the subject is Mr.
Roland Michell, and in his volume on the Egyptian
Calendar, to which I am already indebted, a conjecture
is mentioned which would account for the
modern name of the Roman fortress at least. Kasr
el Shama—or, as it is pronounced, “esh Shemmah”
—is, in English, the Castle of the Flame or Light,
and may mark the site of a temple of fire-worshippers.
Be this as it may—and no more plausible
derivation has been suggested—there are no Persian
remains now to be seen at Babloon, and the unobservant
traveller might very easily pass by the
Roman walls half buried in grey mounds, though they
would well repay, what they have never yet received,
a careful survey.

The western face now consists of a long wall of
large stone blocks, under which a low entrance has
been burrowed, leading into a very rabbit warren
of miserable dwellings, Coptic churches, Moslem
mosques, monasteries, synagogues, and bazaars, uniform
only in dirt and darkness. To the ecclesiastical
antiquary there is much worth seeing among the
strange piles of mud and brick.

Of the remains the most interesting is a church
built in the eighth century, where they show in the
crypt a kind of cave in which the Holy Family is said
to have lain concealed during the flight into Egypt.
A plan of the church is in Baedecker, but the best

description is that contributed by Mr. Greville Chester
to Murray's Handbook. Another church, appropriated
to the members of the Greek communion,
contains, far up stairs in one of the bastions, some
of the most beautiful old tiles I have ever seen.
There are also some very ancient ivory carvings
and pictures, and a little stained glass. This church
is dedicated to Sitt Mariam (St. Mary), and is locally
called the Hanging Church, on account of its elevated
position.

The Roman antiquary will feel inclined to pass by
the door and to trace as best he can the circuit of the
walls. They would be of the highest antiquity almost
anywhere but in Egypt. Here they are among the
most recent of architectural remains. Continuing along
the outer wall, two well-defined semicircular bastions,
once pierced with arched windows, or embrasures, recall
similar buildings at York, in London, at Trèves—
anywhere, in fact, where the military engineers of old
Rome built their fortresses. There is no mistake
about the banded masonry, the thin bricks, the hard
mortar, or any other of many marks by which Roman
work may be identified; though high up, with the
wall for a foundation, a tall whitewashed dwelling
looks over, and seems tottering to a fall. This
western, front is perhaps two hundred yards long,
and ends with another semicircular tower facing
south. This tower is very perfect to a height of
perhaps twenty feet, and is the first of a series of

three, each some fifty feet in width, which range
along the same side—the side, that is, which looked
towards Memphis. If we climb the mound in front,
the wide green plain with its palm-groves across the
river stretches for miles over the site of the vast city,
and the tombs of the inhabitants still cluster round
the pyramids on the hill beyond. From the gate
between two of the bastions, now sunk in ashes to
the top of its pedimented archway, the soldiers of
Cæsar watched the Nile and held the chief link in
the chain which bound Egypt and Memphis to Rome.
A few years ago there was still a trace of an eagle
carved beside the arch, and everything is in a style
wholly foreign, and different from the native
Egyptian work.