s makes all the difficulty; for out-of-doors
the air may be and often is charming; but upon coming in from the bright
sunshine the atmosphere of one's sitting-room and bedroom seems chilly
and prison-like. There are, generally speaking, no chimneys in Cairo,
even in the modern quarter. Each of the hotels has one or two open
grates, but only one or two. Southern countries, however, are banded
together--so it seems to the shivering Northerner--to keep up the
delusion that they have no cold weather; as they have it not, why
provide for it? In Italy in the winter the Italians spread rugs over
their floors, hang tapestries upon their walls, pile cushions
everywhere, and carpet their sofas with long-haired skins; this they
call warmth. But a fireless room, with the thermometer on its walls
standing at 35 deg., is not warm, no matter how many cushions you may put
into it; and one hates to believe, too, that necessary accompaniments
of health are roughened faces and frost-bitten noses, and the extreme
ugliness of hands swollen and red. "Perhaps if one could have in Cairo
an open hearth and three sticks, it would, with all the other pleasures
which one finds here, be too much--would reach wickedness!" was a remark
we heard last winter. A still more forcible exclamation issued from the
lips of a pilgrim from New York one evening in January. Looking round
her sitting-room upon the roses gathered that day in the open air, upon
the fly-brushes and fans and Oriental decorations, this misguided person
moaned, in an almost tearful voice: "Oh, for a blizzard and a _fire_!"
The reasonable traveller, of course, ought to remember that with a
climate which has seven months of debilitating heat, and three and a
half additional months of summer weather, the attention of the natives
is not strongly turned towards devices for warmth. This consideration,
however, does not make the fireless rooms agreeable during the few weeks
that remain.

[Illustration: THE NILE BRIDGE, CAIRO

From a photograph by Sebah, Cairo]

Another surprise is the rain. "In our time it rained in Egypt," writes
Strabo, as though chronicling a miracle. Either the climate has changed,
or Strabo was not a disciple of the realistic school, for in the January
of this truthful record the rain descended in such a deluge in Cairo
that the water came above the knees of the horses, and a ferry-boat was
established for two days in one of the principal streets. Later the rain
descen