ancient residence of Pharaoh the
Impaler; mistress of rich and extended regions, attaining the utmost
limits of possibility in the multitude of its population, and exalting
itself on account of its beauty and splendor. It is the rendezvous of
travelers, the station of the weak and the powerful. Thou wilt there
find all that thou desirest--the wise and the ignorant, the industrious
and the trifling, the mild or the angry, men of low extraction or of
lofty birth, the illustrious and the obscure. The number of its
inhabitants is so considerable that their currents resemble those of an
agitated sea, and the city lacks very little of being too small to
contain them, notwithstanding its extent and capacity. Although founded
long since, it enjoys a youth forever renewed; the star of its horoscope
does not cease to inhabit a fortunate house. It is in speaking of Cairo
that Wasr ed-deen has written:

"It is a paradise in truth; its gardens ever smile,
Adorned and fed so plenteously by all the waves of Kile,
Which, fretted by the blowing wind, from shore across to shore,
Mimic the armor's azure scales the prophet David wore;
Within its fluid element the naked fear to glide,
And ships, like winged heavenly spheres, go up and down the tide.'"

Ibn Batuta's description of the pyramids is very curious, and we can
account for it on no other supposition than that he merely saw them in
the distance (probably from the citadel of Cairo), relying on hearsay
for further particulars. After stating that they were built by the
ancient _Hermes_, whom he supposes to be identical with Enoch, as a
repository for the antediluvian arts and sciences, he says: 'The
pyramids are built of hard, well-cut stone. They are of a very
considerable elevation, and of a circular form, capacious at the base
and narrow at the summit, _in the fashion of cones_. They have no doors,
and one is ignorant of the manner in which they have been constructed.'

In his journey up the Nile, Ibn Batuta never fails to give an account of
every Moslem saint or theologian whom he meets, but only in one or two
instances does he mention the antiquities, which, in that age, must have
been still more conspicuous than now. He even passes over the plain of
Thebes without the slightest notice of the great temple of Karnak.
Disappointed in his plan of crossing the Red Sea to Jidda, he returned
to Cairo, and at once set out for Syria. Here, the first place of
interest which