had only provisions for a
month, and famine soon made its appearance. It was a fearful sight to
see the multitude convulsively working against time. As a dying horse
bites the ground in his agony, they tore up that great grave--25,000
people perished, but the grim contract was completed, and in six weeks
the waters of the Nile were led to Alexandria.

It was midnight when we arrived at Atfeh, the point of junction with the
Nile. We are now on the sacred river. In some hours we emerged from the
Rosetta branch and the prospect began to improve. Villages sheltered by
graceful groups of palm-trees, mosques, green plains, and at length the
desert--the most imposing sight in the world, except the sea. We felt
we were actually in Egypt and our spirits rose. By the time the evening
and the mist had rendered the country invisible, we had persuaded
ourselves that Egypt was indeed the lovely land that Moore has so
delightfully imagined in the pages of the "Epicurean."

_III--Cairo and Heliopolis_

Morning found us anchored off Boulak, the port of Cairo. Toward the
river it is faced by factories and storehouses; within, you find
yourself in a labyrinth of brown, narrow streets, that resemble rather
rifts in some mud mountain, than anything with which architecture has
had to do. Yet here and there the blankness of the walls is relieved and
broken by richly worked lattices, and specimens of arabesque masonry.

Gaudy bazaars strike the eye, and the picturesque population that swarms
everywhere keeps the interest awake. On emerging from the lanes of
Boulak, Cairo, Grand Cairo! opens on the view; and never did fancy flash
upon the poet's eye a more superb illusion of power and beauty than the
"city of Victory" presents from a distance. ("El Kahira," the Arabic
epithet of this city, means "the Victorious.") The bold range of the
Mokattam mountains is purpled by the rising sun, its craggy summits are
clearly cut against the glowing sky, it runs like a promontory into a
sea of verdure, here wavy with a breezy plantation of olives, there
darkened with accacia groves.

Just where the mountain sinks upon the plain, the citadel stands upon
its last eminence, and widely spread beneath it lies the city, a forest
of minarets with palm-trees intermingled, and the domes of innumerable
mosques rising, like enormous bubbles, over the sea of houses. Here and
there, richly green gardens are islanded within that sea, and the whole
is girt round w