Our trusty Mohammed had engaged donkeys for us the next day, and promised to take us to every place worth seeing in the city.  We were strongly tempted to visit the Pyramids, but were deterred by the danger of losing the steamer at Suez, and by the difficulties of the undertaking.  We were told that the Nile was not sufficiently flooded to admit of our approach in a boat, and that we should be up to the donkey’s knees in mud if we attempted to go upon the backs of those animals.  We, therefore, reluctantly relinquished the idea, and contented ourselves with what we could see of Cairo.

Our first visit was directed to the Citadel, a place which, I do not scruple to say, was to me quite as interesting as any of the monuments of ancient art that Egypt contains.  The remains of ages long past, and whose history is involved in unfathomable obscurity, excite our wonder and admiration, and fill us with an almost painful curiosity to draw aside the veil which time has thrown around them, and to learn secrets that all the learning of man has hitherto been unable to unfold.  The citadel of Cairo, on the contrary, has been the theatre of comparatively recent events; it is filled with recollections of the hero whose exploits, narrated by the most eloquent pens, have charmed us in our childhood, and still continue to excite interest in our breasts—­the Sultan Saladin.  Here are the remains of a palace which he once inhabited, and here is a well which bears his name.  Who could sit under the broken pillars of that roofless palace, or drink the water from the deep recesses of that well, without allowing their thoughts to wander back to the days of the Crusades, those chivalric times, in which love, and war, and religion, swayed the hearts and the actions of men; when all that was honoured and coveted was to be found in a soldier of the cross, and when half-frantic enthusiasts, pursuing the vainest of hopes, the recovery of the Holy Land, brought away with them what they did not go to seek, the arts, and learning, and science of the East!  The janissary, who was with us, pointed out the direction in which Damietta now stands, and I was instantly filled with a desire to see Damietta, of which I had heard and read so much.

The most exciting romance of Oriental history is to be found amid the deserts that surround Egypt; and even if the most spirit-stirring tale of all, the Talisman, had not been written, the scenes in which our own lion-hearted Richard figured, and which witnessed the exploits of the Templars and the knights of St. John of Jerusalem, could not fail to create the highest degree of pleasurable feeling in minds capable of enjoying such brilliant reveries of the past.  The Citadel of Cairo is also fraught with the recollections of an event which startled all Europe within the memory of many of the present generation—­the massacre of the Mamelukes.  We were shown the broken cleft in the wall from which the only one of the devoted men who escaped urged his gallant horse; it was, indeed, a fearful leap, and we gazed upon, the spot and thought of the carnage of that dreadful hour with an involuntary shudder.