The view is interesting, and makes one realize the commercial importance of this great emporium of trade, the meeting-place of the commerce of three continents, yet it does not offer many features to distinguish it from a view of any other thriving port.
For the best view of the city and the surrounding country we must climb the slopes of Mount Caffarelli to the fort which crowns the summit, or make our way to the fortress Kom-el-Deek on the elevated ground near the Rosetta Gate. Alexandria, spread out like a map, lies at our feet. At this height the commonplace aspect of a bustling and thriving seaport, which seems on a close acquaintance to be Europeanized and modernized out of the least resemblance to an oriental city, is changed to a prospect of some beauty. At Alexandria, even more than at most cities of the East, distance lends enchantment to the view. From these heights the squalid back streets and the bustling main thoroughfares look like dark threads woven into the web of the city, relieved by the white mosques, with their swelling domes curving inward like fan palms towards the crescents flashing in the rays of the sun, and their tall graceful minarets piercing the smokeless and cloudless atmosphere. The subdued roar of the busy streets and quays is occasionally varied by the melodious cry of the muezzin. Then looking northward one sees the clear blue of the Mediterranean, till it is lost in the hazy horizon. To the west and south the placid waters of the Mareotis Lake, in reality a shallow and insalubrious lagoon, but to all appearances a smiling lake, which, with its water fringed by the low-lying sand dunes, reminds the spectator of the peculiar beauties of the Norfolk Broads.
Looking south beyond the lake lies the luxuriant plain of the Delta. The view may not be what is called picturesque, but the scenery has its special charm. The country is no doubt flat and monotonous, but there is no monotony of color in this richly cultivated plain.
Innumerable pens have been worn out in comparison and simile when describing the peculiar features of this North African Holland. To some this huge market garden with its network of canals, simply suggests a chess-board. Others are not content with these prosaic comparisons, and their more fanciful metaphor likens the country to a green robe interwoven with silver threads, or to a seven-ribbed fan, the ribs being of course the seven mouths of the Nile. Truth to tell, though, the full force of this fanciful image would be more felt by a spectator who is enjoying that glorious panorama from the Cairo citadel, as the curious triangular form of the Delta is much better seen from that point than from Alexandria at the base of the triangle.
One may differ as to the most appropriate metaphors, but all must agree that there are certain elements of beauty about the Delta landscape. Seen, as most tourists do see it, in winter or spring, the green fields of waving corn and barley, the meadows of water-melons and cucumbers, the fields of pea and purple lupin one mass of colors, interspersed with the palm-groves and white minarets, which mark the site of the almost invisible mud villages, and intersected thickly with countless canals and trenches that in the distance look like silver threads, and suggest Brobdignagian filigree work, or the delicate tracery of King Frost on our window-panes, the view is impressive and not without beauty.
In the summer and early autumn, especially during August and September when the Nile is at its height, the view is more striking though hardly so beautiful. Then it is that this Protean country offers its most impressive aspect. The Delta becomes an inland archipelago studded with green islands, each island crowned with a white-mosqued village, or conspicuous with a cluster of palms. The Nile and its swollen tributaries are covered with huge-sailed dahabyehs, which give life and variety to the watery expanse.
Alexandria can boast of few “lions” as the word is usually understood, but of these by far the most interesting is the column known by the name of Pompey’s Pillar. Everyone has heard of the famous monolith, which is as closely associated in people’s minds with Alexandria as the Colosseum is with Rome, or the Alhambra with Granada. It has, of course, no more to do with the Pompey of history (to whom it is attributed by the unlettered tourist) than has Cleopatra’s Needle with that famous Queen, the “Serpent of Old Nile”; or Joseph’s Well at Cairo with the Hebrew Patriarch. It owes its name to the fact that a certain prefect, named after Cæsar’s great rival, erected on the summit of an existing column a statue in honor of the horse of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. There is a familiar legend which has been invented to account for the special reason of its erection, which guide-book compilers are very fond of. According to this story, this historic animal, through an opportune stumble, stayed the persecution of the Alexandrian Christians, as the tyrannical emperor had sworn to continue the massacre till the blood of the victims reached his horse’s knees. Antiquarians and Egyptologists are, however, given to scoffing at the legend as a plausible myth.
In the opinion of many learned authorities, the shaft of this column was once a portion of the Serapeum, that famous building which was both a temple of the heathen god Serapis and a vast treasure-house of ancient civilization. It has been suggested—in order to account for its omission in the descriptions of Alexandria, given by Pliny and Strabo, who had mentioned the two obelisks of Cleopatra—that the column had fallen, and that the Prefect Pompey had merely re-erected it in honor of Diocletian, and replaced the statue of Serapis with one of the Emperor—or of his horse, according to some chroniclers. This statute, if it ever existed, has now disappeared. As it stands, however, it is a singularly striking and beautiful monument, owing to its great height, simplicity of form, and elegant proportions. It reminds the spectator a little of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, and perhaps the absence of a statue is not altogether to be regretted considering the height of the column, as it might suggest to the irrepressible tourists who scoff at Nelson’s statue as the “Mast-headed Admiral,” some similar witticism at the expense of Diocletian.
With the exception of this monolith, which, “a solitary column, mourns above its prostrate brethren,” only a few fragmentary and scattered ruins of fallen columns mark the site of the world-renowned Serapeum. Nothing else remains of the famous library, the magnificent portico with its hundred steps, the vast halls, and the four hundred marble columns of that great building designed to perpetuate the glories of the Ptolemies. This library, which was the forerunner of the great libraries of modern times, must not be confounded with the equally famous one that was attached to the Museum, whose exact site is still a bone of contention among antiquarians. The latter was destroyed by accident, when Julius Cæsar set fire to the Alexandrian fleet. The Serapeum collection survived for six hundred years, till its wanton destruction through the fanaticism of the Caliph Omar. The Arab conqueror is said to have justified this barbarism with a fallacious epigram, which was as unanswerable, however logically faulty, as the famous one familiar to students of English history under the name of Archbishop Morton’s Fork. “If these writings,” declared the uncompromising conqueror, “agree with the Book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.” Nothing could prevail against this flagrant example of a petitio principii, and for six months the three hundred thousand parchments supplied fuel for the four thousand baths of Alexandria.
Hard by Pompey’s Pillar is a dreary waste, dotted with curiously carved structures. This is the Mohammedan cemetery. As in most Oriental towns, the cemetery is at the west end of the town, as the Mohammedans consider that the quarter of the horizon in which the sun sets is the most suitable spot for their burying-places.