Like Paris, it is a city of cafes. During the evening and far into the
night, crowds of individuals of every nationality are seen seated in
groups before them in the open air, drinking every sort of known liquid,
but coffee taking precedence of all others. In picturesqueness of
costume, the Turk leads the world. There is none of the buttoned-up
aspect of Europeans about him. His graceful turban and flowing robes are
worthy of the classic antique, while the rich contrast of colors which
he always wears adds finish to the general effect. As he sits
cross-legged before his open bazar, smoking his long pipe, he looks very
wise, learned, and sedate, though in point of fact, as has been shrewdly
said, there are doubtless more brains under the straw hat of a Yankee
peddler than under three average turbans. The dark, narrow lanes and
endless zigzag alleys had an indescribable interest, with their
accumulated dirt of neglect and dust of a land where rain is so seldom
known. One looks up in passing at those overhanging balconies, imagining
the fate of the harem-secluded women behind them, occasionally catching
stolen glances from curious eyes peering between the lattices. What a
life is theirs! Education is unknown among the Egyptian women. They have
no mental resort. Life, intellectually, is to them a blank. There was a
mingled atmospheric flavor impregnating everything with an incense-like
odor, thoroughly Oriental. One half expected to meet Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves, as we still look for Antonio and the Jew on the Rialto at
Venice. The whole city, with myriads of drawbacks, was yet very sunny,
very interesting, very attractive. The dreams of childhood, with those
veracious Arabian stories and pictures, were constantly before the
mind's eye, in all their extravagant absurdities, stimulating the
imagination to leap from fancy to fancy as it achieved grotesque
impossibilities, and peopled the present scene as in the days of Haroun
Alraschid.

Camels and donkeys were in endless numbers; the latter, small creatures
carrying enormous loads, and often having big, lazy men on their
backs,--so immeasurably disproportioned to the animals as to seem liable
to break their tiny limbs like pipe stems. Of course the fable, wherein
the old man was told it was more fitting that he should carry his ass
than that his ass should carry him, occurred to us. Scores of Egyptian
porters, bent half double, carried on their backs loads that would
s