rying the water to the furthest corners of the
land, while such boundary marks as exist to separate different estates
or farms usually take the form of a watercourse.

These canal banks form the highways of the country, and are thronged
by travellers and laden camels, while large flocks of sheep and goats
are herded along their sloping sides. Every here and there are little
enclosures, spread with clean straw or mats, and surrounded by a fence
of cornstalks or low walls of mud. These are the holy places where in
the intervals of work the devout Moslem may say his prayers; and,
often bowered by shady trees, a whitewashed dome marks the
burial-place of some saint or village notable.

The scenery of the delta, though flat, is luxuriant; for Mohammed Ali
not only introduced cotton into Egypt, but compelled the people to
plant trees, so that the landscape is varied by large groves of
date-palms, and the sycamores and other trees which surround the
villages and give shade to the paths and canal banks. It is a pastoral
land, luxuriantly green; and how beautiful it is as the night falls,
and the last of the sunset lingers in the dew-laden air, wreathed with
the smoke of many fires; and, as the stars one by one appear in the
darkening sky, and the labour of the field ceases, the lowing cattle
wend their slow ways toward the villages and the bull-frogs in their
thousands raise their evensong. No scenery in the world has, to my
mind, such mellow and serene beauty as these farm-lands of Lower
Egypt, and in a later chapter I will tell you more about them, and of
the simple people whose life is spent in the fields.

CHAPTER III

CAIRO--I

Usually its capital may be taken as typical of its country; but in
Egypt this is not so. Cairo is essentially different from anything
else in Egypt, not only in its buildings and architecture, but in the
type and mode of life of its inhabitants.

How shall I give you any real idea of a city which is often considered
to be the most beautiful Oriental capital in the world, as it is
certainly one of the most interesting? From a distance, looking across
the fields of Shoubra,[2] it is very beautiful, especially at sunset,
when beyond the dark green foliage of the sycamore and cypress trees
which rise above the orange groves, the domes and minarets of the
native quarter gleam golden in the sunlight. Behind is the citadel,
crowned by Mohammed Ali's tomb-mosque of white marble, whose tall tw