[372]. Arab. "Zarzariyah"=the colour of a stare or starling (Zurzúr).
[373]. Now a Railway Station on the Alexandria-Cairo line.
[374]. Even as late as 1852, when I first saw Cairo, the city was girt by waste lands and the climate was excellent. Now cultivation comes up to the house walls; while the Mahmudiyah Canal, the planting the streets with avenues and over-watering have seriously injured it; those who want the air of former Cairo must go to Thebes. Gout, rheumatism and hydrophobia (before unknown) have become common of late years.
[375]. This is the popular pronunciation: Yákút calls it "Bilbís."
[376]. An outlying village on the "Long Desert," between Cairo and Palestine.
[377]. Arab. "Al-Kuds"=holiness. There are few cities which in our day have less claim to this title than Jerusalem; and, curious to say, the "Holy Land" shows Jews, Christians and Moslems all in their worst form. The only religion (if it can be called one) which produces men in Syria is the Druse. "Heiligen-landes Jüden" are proverbial and nothing can be meaner than the Christians while the Moslems are famed for treachery.
[378]. Arab. "Shamm al-hawá." In vulgar parlance to "smell the air" is to take a walk especially out of town. There is a peculiar Egyptian festival called "Shamm al-Nasím" (smelling the Zephyr) which begins on Easter-Monday (O.S.), thus corresponding with the Persian Nau-roz, vernal equinox and introducing the fifty days of "Khammasín" or "Mirisi" (hot desert winds). On awaking, the people smell and bathe their temples with vinegar in which an onion has been soaked and break their fast with a "fisikh" or dried "búri"=mullet from Lake Menzalah: the late Hekekiyan Bey had the fish-heads counted in one public garden and found 70,000. The rest of the day is spent out of doors "Gypsying," and families greatly enjoy themselves on these occasions. For a longer description see a paper by my excellent friend Yacoub Artin Pasha, in the Bulletin de l'Institut Égyptien, 2nd series, No. 4, Cairo, 1884. I have noticed the Mirisi (Southwester) and other winds in the Land of Midian, i., 23.
[379]. So in the days of the "Mameluke Beys" in Egypt a man of rank would not cross the street on foot.
[380]. Arab. Basrah. The city now in decay and not to flourish again till the advent of the Euphrates Valley R.R., is a modern place, founded in A.H. 15, by the Caliph Omar upon the Aylah, a feeder of the Tigris. Here, according to Al-Hariri, the "whales and the lizards meet;" and, as the tide affects the river,
Its stream shows prodigy, ebbing and flowing.