shing
from a small triangular raft, composed of palm-branches fastened on the
tops of a number of earthen vases. This raft had a remarkably light
appearance; it seemed only just to touch the surface of the water, but
was evidently badly calculated for such rude encounters as the one which
we had lately experienced. Soon afterwards the tops of the great
Pyramids of Giseh caught our admiring gaze, and in the morning of the
12th of August we landed at Boulac, from which a ride of half an hour on
donkeys brought our party to the hospitable mansion of the
Consul-General, who was good enough to receive us in his house until we
could procure quarters for ourselves.

Having arrived at Cairo, a short account of the history of the city may
be interesting to some readers. In the sixth and seventh centuries of
our era this part of Egypt was inhabited principally by Coptic
Christians, whose chief occupation consisted in quarrelling among
themselves on polemical points of divinity and ascetic rule. The deserts
of Nitria and the shores of the Red Sea were peopled with swarms of
monks, some living together in monasteries, some in lavras, or monastic
villages, and multitudes hiding their sanctity in dens and caves, where
they passed their lives in abstract meditation. In the year 638 the
Arabian general Amer ebn el As, with four hundred Arabs (see Wilkinson),
advanced to the confines of Egypt, and after thirty days' siege took
possession of Pelusium, which had been the barrier of the country on the
Syrian side from the earliest periods of the Egyptian monarchy: he
advanced without opposition to the city of Babylon, which occupied the
site of Masr el Ateekeh, or Old Cairo, on the Nile; but the Roman
station, which is now a Coptic monastery, containing a chamber said to
have been occupied by the blessed Virgin, was so strong a fortress that
the invaders were unable to effect an entrance in a siege of seven
months. After this, a reinforcement of four hundred men arriving at
their camp, their courage revived, and the castle of Babylon was taken
by escalade. On the site of the Arabian encampment at Fostat, Amer
founded the first mosque built on Egyptian soil. The town of Babylon
was connected with the island of Rhoda by a bridge of boats, by which a
communication was kept up with the city of Memphis, on the other side of
the Nile. The Copts, whose religious fanaticism occasioned them to hate
their masters, the Greeks of the Eastern Empire, m