Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/447

 high-priced and dishonest town, but the boatman charged only six cents each to take us to land, and the price of a carriage is only fifty cents an hour. We engaged a guide, because one followed us, and began explaining things, and we could not get rid of him. Besides, he said his price was only a shilling an hour. In no other town we have visited have we found prices as low as in Port Said, which has a worse reputation than any other town in the world. Port Said has regulations for the protection of visitors, and enforces them. When you go ashore, you do not pay the boatman, who may charge you any price he sees fit, but you pay an official at the landing. Get rid of the notion printed everywhere that Port Said is "tough." In addition to being an orderly place, it is very interesting. Sunday is not observed in the town, for two reasons: 1. Ships arrive and send passengers ashore nearly every hour of every day, and these want supplies on Sunday the same as on other days; 2. The sixty thousand inhabitants are mainly Mohammedans, and they have no Sunday There were several other ships in the harbor, and the streets were crowded at 8 In front of one café, an orchestra of fifteen men and women was playing, and playing well. Most of the shops are devoted to tourist trade, but we visited an Arab market instead of the curio stores. The older portion of Port Said is as purely Egyptian as Cairo, and as dirty and oriental. The streets are narrow, and the houses high, and the native shops are as interesting as they are anywhere. Our guide was an Arab, and took us to his church: a Mohammedan mosque, which we could not enter with