In the greatness and cruelty of its accomplishment, this Mahmoudie canal may vie with the gigantic labours of the Pharaohs. From the villages of the delta were swept 250,000 men, women, and children, and heaped like a ridge along the banks of the fatal canal. They had only provisions for a month, and famine soon made its appearance. It was a fearful sight to see the multitude convulsively working against time. As a dying horse bites the ground in his agony, they tore up that great grave—25,000 people perished, but the grim contract was completed, and in six weeks the waters of the Nile were led to Alexandria.
It was midnight when we arrived at Atfeh, the point of junction with the Nile. We are now on the sacred river. In some hours we emerged from the Rosetta branch and the prospect began to improve. Villages sheltered by graceful groups of palm-trees, mosques, green plains, and at length the desert—the most imposing sight in the world, except the sea. We felt we were actually in Egypt and our spirits rose. By the time the evening and the mist had rendered the country invisible, we had persuaded ourselves that Egypt was indeed the lovely land that Moore has so delightfully imagined in the pages of the "Epicurean."
III—Cairo and Heliopolis
Morning found us anchored off Boulak, the port of Cairo. Toward the river it is faced by factories and storehouses; within, you find yourself in a labyrinth of brown, narrow streets, that resemble rather rifts in some mud mountain, than anything with which architecture has had to do. Yet here and there the blankness of the walls is relieved and broken by richly worked lattices, and specimens of arabesque masonry.
Gaudy bazaars strike the eye, and the picturesque population that swarms everywhere keeps the interest awake. On emerging from the lanes of Boulak, Cairo, Grand Cairo! opens on the view; and never did fancy flash upon the poet's eye a more superb illusion of power and beauty than the "city of Victory" presents from a distance. ("El Kahira," the Arabic epithet of this city, means "the Victorious.") The bold range of the Mokattam mountains is purpled by the rising sun, its craggy summits are clearly cut against the glowing sky, it runs like a promontory into a sea of verdure, here wavy with a breezy plantation of olives, there darkened with accacia groves.
Just where the mountain sinks upon the plain, the citadel stands upon its last eminence, and widely spread beneath it lies the city, a forest of minarets with palm-trees intermingled, and the domes of innumerable mosques rising, like enormous bubbles, over the sea of houses. Here and there, richly green gardens are islanded within that sea, and the whole is girt round with picturesque towers and ramparts, occasionally revealed through vistas of the wood of sycamores and fig-trees that surround it. It has been said that "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain," but here they seem commingled with the happiest effect.
The objects of interest in the neighbourhood of Cairo are very numerous. Let us first canter off to Heliopolis, the On of Scripture. It is only five miles of a pathway, shaded by sycamore and plane-trees, from which we emerge occasionally into green savannahs or luxuriant cornfields, over which the beautiful white ibis are hovering in flocks.
In Heliopolis, the Oxford of Old Egypt, stood the great Temple of the Sun. Here the beautiful and the wise studied love and logic 4,000 years ago. Here Joseph was married to the fair Asenath. Here Plato and Herodotus studied and here the darkness which veiled the Great Sacrifice was observed by a heathen astronomer, Dionysius the Areopagite. We found nothing, however, on the site of this ancient city, except a small garden of orange-trees, with a magnificent obelisk in the centre.
IV.—The Market of Sorrow
One day while in Cairo I went to visit the slave-markets, one of which is held without the city, in the courtyard of a deserted mosque. I was received by a mild-looking Nubian, who led me in silence to inspect his stock. I found about thirty girls scattered in groups about an inner court. The gate was open, but there seemed no thought of escape. Where could they go, poor things? Some were grinding millet between two stones; some were kneading flour into bread; some were chatting in the sunshine; some sleeping in the shade.