Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/16

2 ; and that one month later was to be devoted to destruction.

For the present there was nothing to excite apprehension. I landed at Alexandria with no worse fate than that of being pulled this way and that, as every traveller is, by the Arab boatmen, anxious for the honor of carrying his baggage and receiving his money; and drove to the Hotel de l'Europe on the Place Mehemet Ali, which was the scene of the massacre on the 11th of June; and proceeded to Cairo without incident, stopping at Tantah by the way, where four months later foreigners were dragged out of trains and butchered in cold blood. But as yet all was quiet, and when I found myself once more in Cairo, in my old quarters at the Grand New Hotel, where I had been six years before, sitting on the same balcony overlooking the Ezbekieh Square, and listening to the same music floating up from under the palm trees below, I felt as if I were at home, and gave myself up to the full enjoyment of the most delightful of Eastern cities. For a Winter's residence, there is nothing to equal Cairo. The flood of light, which gives brightness and color to everything; the soft and balmy air, which it is a luxury to breathe; the palms, with their tall trunks and tufted crowns; the old mosques, with their minarets, from which the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer; the endless bazaars, with long-bearded Orientals sitting at the place of custom; the picturesque sights of the streets, with dashing carriages, and lithe and springy syces, dressed in white, with red girdles and velvet caps, running before them, as they ran before the chariot of Pharaoh; and the long processions of camels, making such a contrast with the donkeys, waddling under the weight of fat, turbaned Turks, or of women, sitting astride and covered in black from head to foot, with only a pair of eyes peering out from faces thickly veiled; or ambling along, with English riders