for the faithful to assemble at prayer. You may see a group of women, closely veiled and mounted on donkeys, under the escort of a tall eunuch, whose features and complexion mark his Nubian origin. It is the harem of a Moslem out for an airing, and you may seek in vain to penetrate the veils that cover the faces of the fair riders. Their baggy dresses are puffed out like balloons, as the breeze blows against them, and they are as much Oriental as though they had stepped from the pages of the Arabian Nights.
The next minute there comes before you a handsome carriage, drawn by a pair of high-stepping horses, and containing a beautiful woman dressed in all the taste and elegance of Paris or New York. It is the wife, perhaps, of a resident foreigner, and you may see many carriages and many occupants in the course of your promenade. The procession on the donkeys makes way for the vehicle, and halts until it passes. Thus the customs of the Occident are invading the once dull and listless East.
Cairo has grown rapidly in wealth and importance in the past score of years, particularly in the last decade. The Moslem is no longer supreme in commerce as of yore, and finds it useless to sit idly and wait for a customer, as once was his wont. The bustling habit of the European is becoming engrafted upon the country, and the railway and telegraph are teaching to the people the value of time and the disadvantages of the old modes of locomotion. Builders are busy in Cairo, and large edifices, on the plan of Paris, are completed, or in the process of erection.
The new part of Cairo can boast of straight avenues, with lines of shade trees and with rows of well-built houses, from whose windows peep out women, whose unveiled faces show they are not of Moslem faith. While I was in Egypt, a gentleman arrived there after an absence of more than twenty years. He told me he could not recognize that part of Cairo beyond the Ezbekieh gardens. All was changed, and where once were open fields or waste places, there are now the streets and avenues of a city.
There is a handsome bridge of iron across the Nile, and there is a broad and well-built carriage-road from Cairo to the foot of the great Pyramids at Gizeh. Steamboats are plying on the river, and factories rear their tall chimneys on the land. Rows and rows of shops are conducted by foreign capital and tended by foreign men. The streets are lighted with gas, and it is proposed to provide them with wooden pavement, like that which has found favor in many American cities. The post-office is efficiently managed, and so is the police—both of them on the European model.
The temperance of the Orient may prevail among the original inhabitants, but the foreigners manage to get drunk with as much freedom as they would at home, and likewise to be arrested and fined. And so many Christians have found their way there, that crime can be no longer suppressed.
While I was in Cairo there was a burglary that would have done honor to London or New York. A jewelry establishment was entered at night, and property to the value of six thousand pounds sterling was taken. The robbers entered by breaking a hole in a side wall, and they took away everything, except a quantity of clocks, that were evidently too cumbersome. Not a watch, not a piece of jewelry of any kind was left behind, and the fellows got clean away. Does not this sound like civilization?