hanges
little by little. The streets become vulgar: the houses of "The Arabian
Nights" give place to tasteless Levantine buildings; electric lamps
begin to pierce the darkness with their wan, fatiguing glare, and at a
sharp turning the new Cairo is before us.

What is this? Where are we fallen? Save that it is more vulgar, it might
be Nice, or the Riviera, or Interkalken, or any other of those towns
of carnival whither the bad taste of the whole world comes to disport
itself in the so-called fashionable seasons. But in these quarters,
on the other hand, which belong to the foreigners and to the Egyptians
rallied to the civilisation of the West, all is clean and dry, well
cared for and well kept. There are no ruts, no refuse. The fifteen
million pounds have done their work conscientiously.

Everywhere is the blinding glare of the electric light; monstrous hotels
parade the sham splendour of their painted facades; the whole length of
the streets is one long triumph of imitation, of mud walls plastered so
as to look like stone; a medley of all styles, rockwork, Roman, Gothic,
New Art, Pharaonic, and, above all, the pretentious and the absurd.
Innumerable public-houses overflow with bottles; every alcoholic
drink, all the poisons of the West, are here turned into Egypt with a
take-what-you-please.

And taverns, gambling dens and houses of ill-fame. And parading the
side-walks, numerous Levantine damsels, who seek by their finery to
imitate their fellows of the Paris boulevards, but who by mistake, as
we must suppose, have placed their orders with some costumier for
performing dogs.

This then is the Cairo of the future, this cosmopolitan fair! Good
heavens! When will the Egyptians recollect themselves, when will they
realise that their forebears have left to them an inalienable patrimony
of art, of architecture and exquisite refinement; and that, by their
negligence, one of those towns which used to be the most beautiful in
the world is falling into ruin and about to perish?

And nevertheless amongst the young Moslems and Copts now leaving
the schools there are so many of distinguished mind and superior
intelligence! When I see the things that are here, see them with
the fresh eyes of a stranger, landed but yesterday upon this soil,
impregnated with the glory of antiquity, I want to cry out to them, with
a frankness that is brutal perhaps, but with a profound sympathy:

"Bestir yourselves before it is too late. Defen