Said Pasha, predecessor of the deposed Khedive Ismail, dressed in Eastern garb, and his subjects imitated him. At present this light, soft dress, so well adapted for the climate of Egypt and at the same time so becoming, has fallen into disrepute. Government servants are forbidden to wear it, and only the shopkeepers and lower middle classes still retain it. The truncated cone of the tarboosh has superseded the gaily-coloured, many-folded turban, which lent dignity to the presence and protected the shaven head from chills when the cold of night came suddenly down. A heavy, singlebreasted black cloth coat, with stiff collar, has replaced the light and beautifully coloured silken or woollen robes. Whoever can afford it, discards the pretty and comfortable slippers, which can be so quickly put off in the house or the mosque, and forces his feet into polished leather boots, on which the sun burns, and which require some trouble to take off. In the bazaars there are far more articles of light gold jewellery of foreign manufacture than of artistic native handicraft; far more chains and other things from England and Saxony than of beautiful Arabian workmanship. Sheffield and Solingen have far outstripped Damascus. The locomotive is taking the place of the horse, the camel, and the ass; and a tramway will soon be laid through Cairo. How long will it be before factories are built on the cheap ground of the desert, and befoul with coalsmoke its most precious air, which you can to-day enjoy the moment you leave the gates of the city? It is certainly right to pay some attention even here to hygiene, which has made such marked gress in Europe; but in the process of sanitation, what has not gone to nought in Cairo? The Khedive Ismail has vied with the Prefect Hausmann in the demolition of venerable buildings and ancient quarters of the town, and every sin he committed in this matter was laid at the door of the public health.

The injury is simply shocking which has been done to the noblest specimens of Arabian architecture by the monarch just mentioned. The ancient architects followed the plan of laying over a foundation of yellow stone another layer of freestone of delicate natural colour, and they got thereby a splendid effect; for this plan enlivened the most extensive surfaces, and lent them a harmonious aspect. When the invitations were issued for the opening of the Suez Canal, the Khedive began to lose taste of the old weather-beaten walls, to whitewash the mosques; and in order not to give up altogether the idea of the alternate layer of stones, to daub them with long stripes of red and yellow. But what a choice of colour! The yellow was the yellow of the buttercup, the red was the red of new-burnt tiles. It offended eye and heart alike to look on the harlequin costume in which the most precious works of art were dressed up. And then how carelessly were those monuments allowed to fall into decay, and

in what a barbarian manner were their restorations conducted, without so much as guarding against the danger of their falling in. There was nowhere a fond or even intelligent regard for the historical, and the noblest works in wood and stone that had to be removed, were with shocking want of piety delivered over to destruction and suffered to perish.

These enormities ought to be prevented by the influence of England. They were criticized severely at the Oriental Congress, held in London in 1874, by the learned Consul Rodgers, well known as an authority on Oriental coins; but nevertheless much evil has been done in this matter, even since my last visit to Cairo, as I perceive from a recent and stirring paper of Rhone's. There are almost no old mosques in the city of the Caliphs that are not in a crazy state.

But to say the truth, we cannot attribute this lamentable circumstance exclusively to the negligence of the Government. We have pointed out in another place how much of all the ills of the country must be laid at the door of Oriental habits of thinking. Whatever brings no profit, is in their eyes deserving of nothing but destruction. They are entirely wanting in what we call the "historical sense.' The past and its works have small value for them. God gives the present, and what is to come lies in His hand. When a noble monument of antiquity falls to pieces, they comfort themselves with the proverb of Lebid: "Know, O soul, that everything in the world that is not God, is doomed to perish." The Mussulman Cairene despises what dates from the time of the Pharaohs; to him it is through and through kupri, or heathenish; if it disappear from the earth-just so much the better! Unfortunately, too, the architects of the age of the Caliphs must bear part of the blame of the rapid decay of their masterpieces, for they built with an unaccountable carelessness which is certainly calculated to fill their colleagues of the present day with an aversion to come to the rescue.

"Time mocks all, but the Pyramids mock time," says an Arabian proverb. They have been used as quarries, and they have only not been blown into the air, because danger to the town was apprehended from the explosion; the face of the Great Sphinx has served as a target for the guns of the Mamelukes; but these remains of the age of the Pharaohs have nevertheless survived, and will maintain their place even when everything that is venerable for age or beauty in the noble metropolis of the heyday of Mussulman life shall have perished and when Cairo shall be no more than a cluster of miserable hovels like a modern Italian town.

The father has survived the son for thousands of years, for although Cairo was founded by Arabs, it yet stands, not only outwardly but even inwardly, in a relation of sonship to Memphis. The history of the foundation of Cairo, together with the anecdotes that belong to

it, has been narrated a hundred times, but no one has yet attempted to show how much many sides of its rapid and brilliant development owed to the Hellenized, Christianized, but still genuinely Egyptian city of the Pyramids on the other bank of the Nile. A handful of those Moslem heroes who, in the fresh inspiration of their new faith, and penetrated with moral earnestness and the sanctity of their cause, threw down kingdom after kingdom, conquered Egypt on their way. True, they found a powerful ally in the religious hatred that separated the monophysite Egyptians from the orthodox Byzantine authorities, and this hatred was so great that to the Copts it seemed more tolerable to go into subjection to infidels than to be ruled by Greek Christians of another rite from their own, who besides were farther from them by race than their Arabian neighbours. One of their own pastors, Bishop Benjamin, of Alexandria, induced them to conclude an alliance with the infidel, in the same way as in recent times the Bishop of Kū has got his Coptic congregation to go over with him to Protestantism. The commander of the Moslem army knew well what he was about when he detained the Egyptian ambassadors in his camp, in order to show them the moral earnestness of his soldiers, and the lofty piety that animated them. After the sword had decided in favour of the adherents of the Prophet, and the Greeks had lost the day, Mukankas, a Copt, who was Governor of the Nile Valley, exclaimed, after receiving an unfavourable despatch from his imperial master in Constantinople: "By God! these Arabs, with their smaller numbers, are stronger and mightier than we, with all our multitudes; a single man of them is as good as a hundred of us; for they seek death, which is dearer to them than life, and is a positive joy: we cannot hold out against them." And those fearless heroes, whose gallant deeds on Egyptian fields are chronicled in history, were at the same time statesmen of remarkable sagacity.

No other place seemed at that time to be entitled to be the capital of the Nile Valley except Alexandria, and the Commander Amr was disposed to recognize it as such, but the Caliph Omar ordered him to look elsewhere, for he could not conceal from himself that this restless maritime city that continually lent itself to insurrectionary movements, and was situated besides at the extreme verge of the new province, was but ill-adapted to constitute the centre of the life which he wished to plant in the Nile Valley. A place as yet unreached by the threads of party, and the bloody religious disputes in which the age abounded, should be chosen for the seat and centre of the home and foreign administration of the newly conquered country. The new capital was accordingly founded on a well-situated spot, opposite Memphis, on the banks of the still undivided Nile, and according to a well-known story, it was founded

on the very site where the tent of the commander-in-chief had stood. When 'Amr was to go to Alexandria, and gave orders for his tent to be struck, he was told that a pair of pigeons had settled on the roof of it. "God forbid," he exclaimed, "that a Moslem should refuse his shelter to a living being, a creature of God, that has committed itself in confidence to the protection of his hospitality." The tent was forbidden to be touched, and when 'Amr returned from Alexandria victorious, he found it there still, occupied it, and made it the centre from which he proceeded in founding the new capital, which was called Fostat-i.e., the tent. As the town grew, the Arabic name of Egypt, Misr or Masr, was transferred to it, and among the present Moslem inhabitants of the Nile Valley and the Cairenes themselves, it is still called nothing else but Masr-Kahira. The Arabic form of Cairo came to be added to the old name 300 years after the foundation of the city, and though Europeans use the later name exclusively, it is very seldom heard among the natives. Many of them at the present day would understand as

little what you meant if you asked them about Cairo or Kahira as a Saxon peasant would understand if you asked him about the "Florence of the Elbe" (Dresden). Dschōtar, the commander of the Fatimide Muizz, who added to Fostat the new quarter which forms the Cairo of to-day, gave to this quarter the name of Masr-elKahira, because the planet Mars (El-Kahir) crossed the meridian at the very time when the foundation-stone of the walls that surrounded it was laid. Since El-Kahir means the victorious, Masr-el-Kahira may be rendered Masr the Victorious. The foundation of Fostat, now old Cairo (in Arabic, Masr-el-Atīka), took place in the year 638, so that it belongs by right to the younger towns of the world.

Its outward, and still more its inward, development proceeded with remarkable rapidity. When we consider that this town owes its origin entirely to illiterate children of the desert, and then reflect that not two hundred years after its foundation Harun-er-Raschid's son Mamun († 883), found here in full bloom a rich scientific life which embraced all, including even the most difficult, disciplines, we are in presence of a phenomenon which has been hitherto noted and ascribed to the fine and susceptible mind of the Arabs, but which, on closer inspection, becomes simply inexplicable, unless we take into account the non-Moslem factors that co-operated in this rapid development. We shall direct our special attention to these factors, and try to show how the Arabs have contrived in Cairo to build the house of their peculiar culture out of Egyptian wood.

Cairo is not so modern as it seems. The Fostat which 'Amr founded is connected with the Fort Babylon which was certainly erected in prehistoric times. One legend relates that prisoners of

war of the great Ramses-and another that the Babylonians in the army of Cambyses, which conquered Egypt in 525 A.D.-founded it as a "New Babylon ;" and history records that among the Romans one of the three legions that occupied Egypt had their quarters here. But this fort existed long before the Persian invasion, and even before Ramses II. Early writings call it Cher or Cheran (Battletown), and in a text in the temple of Kurna, dating from the fourteenth century B.C., we are told of it that the Lower Egyptian Nile began there, that it was measured there, and that from thence it sought its way in the arms of the Delta. It further appears from the inscription of the Ethiopian Pianchi, that a street of Memphis (across the Nile) led to Cher (Babylon), and from thence to Heliopolis. This route must have passed through the island Rōda, which, at the time of the Moslem invasion, was connected with both banks of the river by a bridge of boats; Memphis was thus closely joined to Babylon. The water-mark, measuring the height of the stream, that stands on the island Rōda (exactly opposite Babylon), and still indicates to the Cairenes the fall of the flood of the Nile, appears to have existed at the time of the Pharaohs, and perhaps it was carried at a later period from the mainland to the island.

The town which was the base of the Fostat of 'Amr was by no means unimportant, whereas the streets and quarters which the governor erected under four building inspectors, and distributed among his soldiers according to their tribes, must have been at first. small and thinly inhabited. Among the Christian churches in Old Cairo (Babylon), there are some which must certainly have existed before the foundation of Fostat. The most remarkable of them, the Coptic church of St. Mary, was in its main parts not built before the eighth century after Christ; but it contains much that shows it to have been originally a Greek temple of a very early period. From Babylon there stretches out a fertile, well-cultivated, and thickly populated plain, full of garden-trees and vineyards, as far as Mokattam; and high above the houses and villas of the Egyptians rises the lighthouse-tower (Kaer esch-Schama), in which the Roman and Greek governors resided when they visited the district before the conquest of the country. The inhabitants of this town and its vicinity enjoyed great comfort, and 'Amr's reports of the Caliphs are full of the plenty in which the peasantry lived and the wealth with which many Egyptian towns were blessed. A Copt of the name of Peter, who kept his riches obstinately concealed, was on friendly terms with a monk in El-Tur (Sinai Monastery). 'Amr sent to this monk and demanded in a letter, sealed with the ring of Peter, and in Peter's name, the delivery of the goods entrusted to him. The messenger brought back a soldered case, and when this was opened it was found to contain a letter on which was written that the money was deposited