Leaving Alexandria for Cairo, it was a matter of course to go by river, passing an attractive town every four miles or so, a very pleasant journey except when the Nile was low, which made it more practicable for the Arabs to attack. On landing at Bulak, the port, there would be asses ready, the wonderful asses of the East celebrated of old in Western Europe, as the canticle witnesses which used to be sung at Beauvais cathedral at the feast of the Circumcision when the ass enters in the procession.[90]
Orientis partibus
Adventavit asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus
Sarcinis aptissimus
Hez, Hez, sire asne, Hez!!
The asses of Bulak fortified tradition by carrying passengers into the city, unattended by any boy, and taking their way back as soon as the ride was over.
The characteristics of Cairo which impressed themselves most on the seventeenth-century traveller were its size, and, notwithstanding its size, its populousness, so great that it was difficult to move for the press of people. Allowances must be made, however, for their standard regarding streets; a large proportion of the ten thousand streets were in reality passages built over, dark and dangerous to an extent which probably exists in few European slums nowadays. The number ten thousand sounds suspicious as a statement of fact, but there was a certain check on it, inasmuch as each "street" was shut at each end by a gate at night and each gate had a guardian as well as a lantern burning; and the number of guardians was twenty thousand besides the four thousand soldiers who patrolled inside the city at night. For the antiquities, there were still to be seen many houses bearing a chalice and two lighted candles, witnesses of Louis IX's captivity in Egypt and the tale of his leaving the sacrament as security for the payment of his ransom on his release; for the rest, knowledge was not in a very advanced state; everything that was not credited to "Pharaoh" was put down to Joseph.
The interest to the tourist centred equally in the excursions. It was but a few miles to Matarea—to use the Italian spelling, preferable with many of the names that occur, especially in this chapter, as a sign of the times—and no Roman Catholic omitted it, seeing that there stood the house where Our Lady dwelt for some years after her flight from Palestine; at Cairo itself was preserved some of the water in which she washed her baby-clothes. Neither, naturally, was any one inclined to pass on without a visit to the Pyramids; no doubt Della Valle's name is still to be found cut on the top of the Great Pyramid on the facet that looks towards Italy. He entered the Great Pyramid, the only one into which entrance was effected at this date; but had no opportunity of saying anything regarding it out of the ordinary; it is when he moved on to what were known as the "Pyramids of the Mummies" that his account of his doings again becomes one of the most remarkable, as well as one of the best written, of research in Egypt. He made a halt at "Abusir," and then after entering one of these minor Pyramids, moved on to "Saccara," the centre for mummy-hunting, which formed the occupation of the boys of the village. On Della Valle's arrival they had a stand-up fight for the privilege of taking him home, and the next morning about fifty were at his door. A procession having been formed, all were set to work in different places probing for tombs, for Della Valle was bent on examining such as had never been opened hitherto. His trouble and expense were well rewarded, for the two mummies he brought away intact were pronounced at Cairo to be the most remarkable that any one there remembered seeing. They cost him three piastri—less than five pounds in our money at present values—each, and are now in Dresden Museum. It was rare for any to be seen intact, for hunting for mummies was not carried on for museums, but because of their supposed medicinal value, greatest, it was thought, in virgin-mummies; one of the rare qualities of Othello's handkerchief consisted in its having been