A great deal of wine is consumed at these festivals, and in the evening one can see many things to interest and amuse him, as the manners and customs of the frequenters of the fair are of a very unrestrained character. It is the right and privilege of a barren woman to visit the fair at Tantah and pray at the tomb of the saint, and her devotion, continued through the week of the fair, is generally rewarded as she desires it should be. Her wish to go to Tantah is one that cannot be denied without the violation of a custom that has existed for many centuries. There are other fairs throughout Egypt similar to the one at Tantah, but none of them succeed in bringing together such a large number of people.
After leaving Tantah we crossed upon iron bridges the Rosetta and Damietta branches of the Nile, and sped along over a line of railway as straight as a sunbeam. There was not much engineering work in building the road, nothing more than to lay down the track after the construction of a bed high enough to keep the rails above the height of the annual inundation. As we approach the coast the country becomes more marshy and unproductive, and the scenery is decidedly monotonous. For several miles the track is through a marsh, and on nearing Alexandria we catch sight, on our left hand, of Lake Mareotis, a shallow body of water much like Lake Lenzalah, through which the Suez Canal runs after leaving Port Said.
We pass near the bank of the Mahmoodieh Canal, which connects Alexandria with the Nile, and was constructed by order of Mohammed Ali in less than a year’s time. It cost about three hundred thousand pounds sterling, and employed a quarter of a million men, of whom twenty thousand died of plague, hunger, and cholera. The average width of the canal is about one hundred feet, and its total length is fifty miles—a reasonably gigantic operation for less than a twelvemonth.
The canal was full of boats as we passed it; we could not see them on account of the high bank, but their masts and sails were visible, and so we argued that the boats were there. Near Alexandria the banks of the canal are bordered with pretty villas and gardens for some distance, and some of the villas are quite picturesque. It has become the fashion for wealthy Alexandrians to have their residences in this locality, and there is a watering-place and popular resort known as Ramleh about half an hour’s ride from the city. The Viceroy has a palace there, and generally resides in it during a portion of the summer.
Our train swept toward the city, passing in sight of Pompey’s Pillar, and through a collection of houses that form a sort of industrial suburb. The station is at the extreme west of the town, and is sufficiently large for all practical purposes, and contained, at our arrival, the usual array of dragomen, porters, and other hangers-on. The streets are quite a contrast to those of Cairo, as they are paved with huge blocks of stone that have so worn away in places as to make them very rough, and quite unpleasant for carriage-driving. The pavement was once excellent, but it has received no attention, and the dust indicates that it is very rarely swept. The dust flew about in clouds, and my companion said that when he was last here there were some heavy rains, and where we found dust, he had found a regular Slough of Despond of mud. I can well believe the mud must have been something frightful, and a ride through it upon a donkey would prove to be something serious.
One of my acquaintances tells me of being pitched head foremost into six or eight inches of it after putting on his best clothes and starting out to make a call, which he indefinitely postponed and returned to his hotel, where he hung up to dry. He had the satisfaction—on the ground that misery loves company—of seeing, while on the way back from his mishap, a gaudily-dressed French woman undergo a similar tumble where the mud was deeper. Her feathers, and flounces, and laces, and general finery were sadly bedraggled, and when she emerged, with the aid of a couple of Arabs, she resembled a canary bird that has passed through a street-sweeping machine.
The city founded by and named for Alexander the Great contains very few traces of its former magnificence. Cleopatra’s Needle and the so-called Pompey’s Pillar are the stock sights; the former is a granite shaft, covered with hieroglyphics, and is far inferior every way to the obelisks at Karnak and Luxor. More beautiful and better placed is the Pillar, standing on an elevation near the Mohammedan burying-ground, and consisting of a base, shaft, and capital, the whole nearly a hundred feet high, and the shaft alone seventy feet long and nearly ten feet in diameter. The shaft is a single piece of red granite, highly polished and elegantly made, the workmanship being far better than that of base or capital. It is probable that a statue once stood on the pillar, and there are some old pictures of Alexandria in which the Pillar is represented with a statue upon it. There is no way of reaching the summit except by a considerable outlay for ropes and ladders, and also for the necessary labor of arranging
