rcely be said to exist any longer, for it has
been turned into a barrack for the army of occupation. English soldiers,
indeed, meet us at every turn, smoking their pipes in the idleness of
the evening. One of them who does not smoke is trying to carve his
name with a knife on one of the layers of marble at the base of the
sanctuary.

At the end of this esplanade there is a kind of balcony from which one
may see the whole of the town, and an unlimited extent of verdant
plains and yellow desert. It is a favourite view of the tourists of the
agencies, and we meet again our friends of the mosque, who have preceded
us hither--the gentlemen with the loud voices, the bellowing guide and
the cackling lady. Some soldiers are standing there too, smoking their
pipes contemplatively. But spite of all these people, in spite, too,
of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on arrival there is
ravishing.

A very fairyland--but a fairyland quite different from that of Stamboul.
For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre above the
Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is spread out
simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert and
dominated by chaotic rocks. Thousands of minarets rise up on every side
like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can see their
innumerable slender points--but instead of being simply, as at Stamboul,
so many white spires, they are here complicated by arabesques, by
galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to have borrowed
the reddish colour of the desert.

The flat rocks tell of a region which formerly was without rain. The
innumerable palm-trees of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and
houses, sway their plumes in the wind, bewildered as it were by these
clouds laden with cold showers. In the south and in the west, at the
extreme limits of the view, as if upon the misty horizon of the plains,
appear two gigantic triangles. They are Gizeh and Memphis--the eternal
pyramids.

At the north of the town there is a corner of the desert quite singular
in its character--of the colour of bistre and of mummy--where a whole
colony of high cupolas, scattered at random, still stand upright in
the midst of sand and desolate rocks. It is the proud cemetery of the
Mameluke Sultans, whose day was done in the Middle Ages.

But if one looks closely, what disorder, what a mass of ruins there
are in this town--still a little fairylike--