of rose and violet, and finally sinking | Imagine a bearded turban-wearer sitting under the dark shroud of night. cross-legged, not on a broad divan, but on Who has joined in the crowd at the a Paris or Vienna armchair! Gone, too, bazaars, who has allowed the venerable is the old arrangement of the dwellingmonuments of the time of the Pharaohs house, so well suited at once to the Egypto work upon his mind, and has regretted tian climate and to the peculiarities of his decision of visiting Egypt? The ad- the Moslem family. He who builds now vice to make a pilgrimage to Cairo is good wishes to build cheaply and rapidly, and advice, and the sooner one follows it the in a sort of European style, and so, from better; for the city of the caliphs is al-never being considered, the wonderful art ready far from being what it was a few of the mason, which delights the connoislustra ago, when it was first our privilege seur in many of the older houses, has to visit it; and if we remain another de- been entirely lost. The picturesque latcade in the country, we shall see similarly tice-windows of the Meschrebijen, whose disappear one feature after another of all thousand finely moulded pieces seem like that to-day gives the place its special a veil of woven wood before the women, charm. The more firmly Western influ- enabling them to see everything doing in ence establishes itself in Egypt, the more the streets without themselves being seen, sensibly do its assimilating power and the are now, in many cases, replaced by the sober practical sense of utility charac- Venetian blinds of Europe. Fine examteristic of our civilization make their pres- ples of the old lattice-work find ready ence apparent. What grows organically purchasers, and they may be often enough among us is transplanted right off into met with in rooms fitted out in Arabian this foreign soil and starts up quite re- style in England, France, and Germany. markably. It is oftentimes like uproot- The same is true of the kursis, desks, ing the palms of the Nile and planting posts, and doors, inlaid with ivory, mothfirs and apple-trees in their place. The er-of-pearl, and various woods; and anabsurdity of many of the improvements cient implements are very eagerly sought every one has felt who has formerly walked after by collectors of art and antiquities. under the shadow of the houses in the In my library stand two old Arabian jugs, narrow lanes of Cairo, and now finds him- which Frank Dillon, of London, the exself in broad squares and wide streets cellent painter of Oriental landscapes and completely unprotected from the fiery architecture, found in an oil-ship, with darts of the sun of the south. This twelve others, and bought for an old song. change is lamented by every traveller I saw an American family send whole who has seen, in other days, riders, car- shipfuls of old Arabian ware to the New riages, camels, and foot-passengers pass- World, and I know that not less than ing like a full stream over the soft roadway seventy finely executed old fauns from of the Muski, with many a call and cry, one of the most famous mosques were but without either rustle or tramp or clat- sold right off to tourists. Said Pasha, ter, and who has now his word drowned predecessor of the deposed khedive at his mouth by the deafening din of Ismail, dressed in Eastern garb, and his wheels, hoofs, and footsteps that rises subjects imitated him. At present this from the glowing pavement. The shade-light, soft dress, so well adapted for the dispensing boards and awnings which in many places covered the most frequented streets of the town have been removed, because such things are not to be found in any Western metropolis. In the dwell-dle classes still retain it. The truncated ings of the well-to-do Egyptians, European furniture has supplanted the native outfitting of the rooms, which is so picturesque and which originated in its suitability to the manners and customs of the Moslems.

climate of Egypt and at the same time so becoming, has fallen into disrepute. Government servants are forbidden to wear it, and only the shopkeepers and lower mid

cone of the tarboosh has superseded the gayly colored, many-folded turban, which lent dignity to the presence and protected the shaven head from chills when the cold of night came suddenly down. A heavy,

precious works of art were dressed up. And then how carelessly were those mon. uments allowed to fall into decay, and in what a barbarian manner were their restorations conducted, without so much as guarding against the danger of their fall

́single-breasted black cloth coat, with stiff | the red was the red of new-burnt tiles. It
collar, has replaced the light and beauti- offended eye and heart alike to look on
fully colored silken or woollen robes. the harlequin costume in which the most
Whoever can afford it, discards the pretty
and comfortable slippers, which can be so
quickly put off in the house or the mosque
and forces his feet into polished leather
boots, on which the sun burns, and which
require some trouble to take off. In the
bazaars there are far more articles of lighting in! There was nowhere a fond or
gold jewelry of foreign manufacture than even intelligent regard for the historical,
of artistic native handicraft; far more and the noblest works in wood and stone
chains and other things from England that had to be removed, were with shock-
and Saxony than of beautiful Arabian ing want of piety delivered over to de-
workmanship. Sheffield and Solingen struction and suffered to perish.
have far outstripped Damascus. The
locomotive is taking the place of the
horse, the camel, and the ass; and a
tramway will soon be laid through Cairo.
How long will it be before factories are
built on the cheap ground of the desert,
and befoul with coal-smoke its most pre-
cious air, which you can to-day enjoy the
moment you leave the gates of the city?
It is certainly right to pay some attention
even here to hygiene, which has made
such marked progress in Europe; but in
the process of sanitation, what has not
gone to naught in Cairo? The khedive
Ismail has vied with the prefect Haus-
mann in the demolition of venerable build-
ings and ancient quarters of the town,
and every sin he committed in this mat-
ter was laid at the door of the public
health.

These enormities ought to be prevented by the influence of England. They were criticised severely by the Oriental Congress, held in London in 1874, by the learned Consul Rodgers, well known as an authority on Oriental coins; but nevertheless much evil has been done in this matter, even since my last visit to Cairo, as I perceive from a recent and stirring paper of Rhone's. There are almost no old mosques in the city of the caliphs that are not in a crazy state.

But to say the truth, we cannot attribute this lamentable circumstance exclusively to the negligence of the government. We have pointed out in another place how much of all the ills of the country must be laid at the door of Oriental habits of thinking. Whatever brings no profit, is in their eyes deserving of nothing but deThe injury is simply shocking which struction. They are entirely wanting in has been done to the noblest specimens what we call the "historical sense." The of Arabian architecture by the monarch past and its works have small value for just mentioned. The ancient architects them. God gives the present, and what followed the plan of laying over a founda- is to come lies in his hand. When a notion of yellow stone another layer of free- ble monument of antiquity falls to pieces, stone of delicate natural color, and they they comfort themselves with the proverb got thereby a splendid effect; for this of Lebid: "Know, O soul, that everyplan enlivened the most extensive sur-thing in the world that is not God, is faces, and lent them a harmonious aspect. doomed to perish." The Mussulman When the invitations were issued for the Cairene despises what dates from the time opening of the Suez Canal, the khedive of the Pharaohs; to him it is through and began to lose taste of the old weather- through kupri, or heathenish; if it disap. beaten walls, to whitewash the mosques: pear from the earth - just so much the and in order not to give up altogether the better! Unfortunately, too, the architects idea of the alternate layer of stones, to of the age of the caliphs must bear part daub them with long stripes of red and of the blame of the rapid decay of their yellow. But what a choice of color! the masterpieces, for they built with an unacyellow was the yellow of the buttercup, countable carelessness which is certainly

calculated to fill their colleagues of the present day with an aversion to come to the rescue.

governor of the Nile valley, exclaimed, after receiving an unfavorable dispatch from his imperial master in Constantinople: "By God! these Arabs, with their smaller numbers, are stronger and mightier than we, with all our multitudes; a single man of them is as good as a hundred of us; for they seek death, which is dearer to them than life, and is a positive joy: we cannot hold out against them." And those fearless heroes, whose gallant deeds on Egyptian fields are chronicled in history, were at the same time statesmen of remarkable sagacity.

"Time mocks all, but the pyramids mock time," says an Arabian proverb. They have been used as quarries, and they have only not been blown into the air, because danger to the town was apprehended from the explosion; the face of the great Sphinx has served as a target for the guns of the Mamelukes; but these remains of the age of the Pharaohs have nevertheless survived, and will maintain their place even when everything that is venerable for age or beauty in the noble No other place seemed at that time to metropolis of the heyday of Mussulman be entitled to be the capital of the Nile life shall have perished, and when Cairo valley except Alexandria, and the comshall be no more than a cluster of miser-mander 'Amr was disposed to recognize able hovels like a modern Italian town. it as such, but the caliph Omar ordered The father has survived the son for thousands of years, for although Cairo was founded by Arabs, it yet stands, not only outwardly but even inwardly, in a relation of sonship to Memphis. The history of the foundation of Cairo, together with the anecdotes that belong to it, has been narrated a hundred times, but no one has yet attempted to show how much many sides of its rapid and brilliant development owed to the Hellenized, Christianized, but still genuinely Egyptian city of the pyramids on the other bank of the Nile. A handful of those Moslem heroes who, in the fresh inspiration of their new faith, and penetrated with moral earnest ness and the sanctity of their cause, threw down kingdom after kingdom, conquered Egypt on their way. True, they found a powerful ally in the religious hatred that separated the monophysite Egyptians from the orthodox Byzantine authorities, and this hatred was so great that to the Copts it seemed more tolerable to go into subjection to infidels than to be ruled by Greek Christians of another rite from their own, who besides were further from them by race than their Arabian neighbors. One of their own pastors, Bishop Benjamin, of Alexandria, induced them to conclude an alliance with the infidel, in the same way as in recent times the Bishop of Ku has got his Coptic congregation to go over with him to Protestantism. The commander of the Moslem army knew well what he was about when he detained the Egyptian embassadors in his camp, in order to show them the 'moral earnestness of his soldiers, and the lofty piety that animated them. After the sword had decided in favor of the adherents of the Prophet, and the Greeks had lost the day, Mukankas, a Copt, who was

him to look elsewhere, for he could not conceal from himself that this restless maritime city that continually lent itself to insurrectionary movements, and was situated besides at the extreme verge of the new province, was but ill adapted to constitute the centre of the life which he wished to plant in the Nile valley. A place as yet unreached by the threads of party, and the bloody religious disputes in which the age abounded, should be chosen for the seat and centre of the home and foreign administration of the newly conquered country. The new capital was accordingly founded on a wellsituated spot, opposite Memphis, on the banks of the still undivided Nile, and according to a well-known story, it was founded on the very site where the tent of the commander-in-chief had stood. When 'Amr was to go to Alexandria, and gave orders for his tent to be struck, he was told that a pair of pigeons had settled on the roof of it. "God forbid," he exclaimed, "that a Moslem should refuse his shelter to a living being, a creature of God, that has committed itself in confi. dence to the protection of his hospitality." The tent was forbidden to be touched, and when 'Amr returned from Alexandria victorious, he found it there still, occupied it, and made it the centre from which he proceeded in founding the new capital, which was called Fostati.e., the tent. As the town grew, the Arabic name of Egypt, Misr or Masr, was transferred to it, and among the present Moslem inhabitants of the Nile valley and the Cairenes themselves, it is still called nothing else but Masr-Kahira. The Arabic form of Cairo came to be added to the old name three hundred years after the foundation of the city, and though

Europeans use the latter name exclusively, it is very seldom heard among the natives. Many of them at the present day would understand as little what you meant if you asked them about Cairo or Kahira as a Saxon peasant would understand if you asked him about the "Florence of the Elbe " (Dresden). Dschōtar, the commander of the Fatimide Muizz, who added to Fostat the new quarter which forms the Cairo of to-day, gave to this quarter the name of Masr-el-Kahira, because the planet Mars (El-Kāhir) crossed the meridian at the very time when the foundation-stone of the walls that surrounded it was laid. Since El-Kahir means the victorious, Masr-el-Kahira may be rendered Masr the Victorious. The foundation of Fostat, now old Cairo (in Arabic, Masr-el-Atika), took place in the year 638, so that it belongs by right to the younger towns of the world.

Egyptian Nile began there, that it was measured there, and that from thence it sought its way in the arms of the Delta. It further appears from the inscription of the Ethiopian Pianchi, that a street of Memphis (across the Nile) led to Cher (Babylon), and from thence to Heliopolis. This rout must have passed through the island Roda, which, at the time of the Moslem invasion, was connected with both banks of the river by a bridge of boats; Memphis was thus closely joined to Babylon. The water-mark, measuring the height of the stream, that stands on the island Rōda (exactly opposite Babylon), and still indicates to the Cairenes the fall of the flood of the Nile, appears to have existed at the time of the Pharaohs, and perhaps it was carried at a later period from the mainland to the island.

The town which was the base of the Fostat of 'Amr was by no means unimIts outward, and still more its inward, portant, whereas the streets and quarters development proceeded with remarkable which the governor erected under four rapidity. When we consider that this building inspectors, and distributed among town owes its origin entirely to illiterate his soldiers according to their tribes, must children of the desert, and then reflect have been at first small and thinly inhabthat not two hundred years after its foun-ited. Among the Christian churches in dation Harun-er-Raschīd's son Mamun Old Cairo (Babylon), there are some which († 883), found here in full bloom a rich scientific life which embraced all, including even the most difficult, disciplines, we are in presence of a phenomenon which has been hitherto noted and ascribed to the fine and susceptible mind of the Arabs, but which, on closer inspection becomes simply inexplicable, unless we take into account the non-Moslem factors that co-operated in this rapid development. We shall direct our special attention to these factors, and try to show how the Arabs have contrived in Cairo to build the house of their peculiar culture out of Egyptian wood.

Cairo is not so modern as it seems. The Fostat which 'Amr founded is connected with the Fort Babylon which was certainly erected in prehistoric times. One legend relates that prisoners of war of the great Ramses and another that the Babylonians in the army of Cambyses, which conquered Egypt in 525 A.D. founded it as a "New Babylon; and history records that among the Romans one of the three legions that occupied Egypt had their quarters here. But this fort existed long before the Persian invasion, and even before Ramses II. Early writings call it Cher or Cheran (Battletown), and in a text in the temple of Kurna, dating from the fourteenth century B.C., we are told of it that the lower

must certainly have existed before the
foundation of Fostat. The most remark-
able of them, the Coptic Church of St.
Mary, was in its main parts not built be-
fore the eighth century after Christ; but it
contains much that shows it to have been
originally a Greek temple of a very early
period. From Babylon there stretches
out a fertile, well cultivated, and thickly
populated plain, full of garden-trees and
vineyards, as far as Mokattam; and high
above the houses and villas of the Egyp-
tians rises the lighthouse - tower (Kaer
esch-Schama), in which the Roman and
Greek governors resided when they vis-
ited the district before the conquest of
the country. The inhabitants of this town
and its vicinity enjoyed great comfort, and
'Amr's reports of the caliphs are full of
the plenty in which the peasantry lived
and the wealth with which many Egyptian
towns were blessed. A Copt of the name
of Peter, who kept his riches obstinately
concealed, was on friendly terms with a
monk in El-Tur (Sini Monastery). 'Amr
sent to this monk and demanded in a let-
ter, sealed with the ring of Peter, and in
Peter's name, the delivery of the goods en-
trusted to him. The messenger brought
back a soldered case, and when this was
opened it was found to contain a letter on
which was written that the money was
deposited under the largest water-tank.

On search there were found there fifty- | livion; even her wonderful ruins disapthree large measures (more than twelve millions of denarii) of coined gold.

peared from the earth, and to-day green asters and palm groves occupy the place On the whole the Egyptians were mildly where once stood one of the most ancient treated, and so they did not fear building and celebrated cities of the world. Only close to the skirts of the garrison town. the monuments in the city of the dead, the Thirty-seven years after the foundation of great graveyard of the Memphites, many that place, so many Copts had settled in miles long, have escaped destruction. The it that the governor Maslema had to per- city of the living, the colossal temples of mit them to build a church of their own. their gods, the "white walls" of the faFostat and Babylon got completely united, mous fort of the town, and the other public and the new place soon became the cen- buildings which once raised proud heads, tral seat of the government, and by its have vanished from the face of the earth. fresh energetic growth cast the venerable, The rapidly extending Cairo needed but back-going and age-enfeebled, Mem- hewn stones, freestones, and columns, phis on the other bank of the Nile com- and the devastated Memphis was the rich pletely into the shade. The celebrated quarry from whence she got them. The city of the pyramids had been a populous same fate befell Heliopolis on the same court city down to the end of the reign of bank of the river, to the north of the the Ptolemies, and even under the Ro- new metropolis. This famous city of mans and Byzantines it might still be scholars, the centre of Egyptian sun-worcalled a great town. But its old fame ship, has also disappeared from the earth, was gone; Christianity had dispersed the and was already in the time of El-Magreat fraternities of heathen priests; and krizi († 1442) no more than a country town Egyptian learning, which had been culti- containing some ruins of dismantled sancvated for thousands of years in the tem-tuaries. A great part of the obelisks ples of Ptah, Imhotep, and other divinities, had lost its peculiar character; it had, in great part, perished altogether, and where it was still cultivated by individuals, had accommodated itself to circumstances by the assumption of new forms. Greek art had completely supplanted the old national Egyptian; Alexandria had absorbed the trade of Memphis; and what Alexandria left of it was diverted by the new and active town on the other bank of the river. The sinking man always makes for the side of the strong swimmer, and so it came about that the Memphites left their own declining town in thousands, and sought for more favorable conditions of life in Fostat. The excellent Arabic writer 'Abdellatif († 1232), found on the site of Memphis nothing but deserted ruins; but these remains were still so extensive that he calls them a world of walls, which confused the mind and baffled the descriptive powers of even the most accomplished writer. He concludes, from a glance at the popular belief, that the ancient Egyp tians were long-lived giants, who were able to move heavy blocks of stone from one spot to another by the use of their magical wands. The only inhabitants of these ruins are said to have been bands of robbers, who were employed by commercial companies to search the fallen edifices and vaults for gold, silver, and other treasures.

Memphis soon sank into complete ob

brought from the Nile to the countries of western Europe originally stood in this place, in front of the temples of the sun, and among others, the so-called Cleopa tra's Needle, now in London, and its twin-sister, transported to America. Hewn stones were easily carried to Fostat by water, or by the old road which connected Heliopolis with Memphis through Babylon; and so one may assume that the houses and palaces of this town rest in good part on ancient Egyptian foundations. More than one building has been discovered in Cairo containing stones inscribed with hieroglyphics. Among these a mighty stele (stone table) of black granite, that was found during the excavations made at the foundation of a house that was pulled down, acquired special celebrity. It contains a perfectly uninjured inscription, which was devoted to the honor of Ptolemy Soter before his official recognition as successor of Alexander II., and establishes by first-hand evidence that he restored to the priests of this place the lands in the northern part of the delta that had been taken from the temple of Bulo; other stones, carved with hieroglyphics, were appropriated in the building of mosques; and who has visited the mosques of Cairo, and not observed the great number of pillars from old heathen buildings that are employed in their construction?

In the mosque of 'Amr, the oldest in all Egypt, stands a forest of pillars. Ev