Passing over the traveler’s visit to Damietta and the other towns of the Delta, let us hear his enthusiastic description of Cairo, at the time of its greatest prosperity:  ’Finally, I reached the city of Cairo, the metropolis of the country and the ancient residence of Pharaoh the Impaler; mistress of rich and extended regions, attaining the utmost limits of possibility in the multitude of its population, and exalting itself on account of its beauty and splendor.  It is the rendezvous of travelers, the station of the weak and the powerful.  Thou wilt there find all that thou desirest—­the wise and the ignorant, the industrious and the trifling, the mild or the angry, men of low extraction or of lofty birth, the illustrious and the obscure.  The number of its inhabitants is so considerable that their currents resemble those of an agitated sea, and the city lacks very little of being too small to contain them, notwithstanding its extent and capacity.  Although founded long since, it enjoys a youth forever renewed; the star of its horoscope does not cease to inhabit a fortunate house.  It is in speaking of Cairo that Wasr ed-deen has written: 

  “It is a paradise in truth; its gardens ever smile,
  Adorned and fed so plenteously by all the waves of Kile,
  Which, fretted by the blowing wind, from shore across to shore,
  Mimic the armor’s azure scales the prophet David wore;
  Within its fluid element the naked fear to glide,
  And ships, like winged heavenly spheres, go up and down the tide.’”

Ibn Batuta’s description of the pyramids is very curious, and we can account for it on no other supposition than that he merely saw them in the distance (probably from the citadel of Cairo), relying on hearsay for further particulars.  After stating that they were built by the ancient Hermes, whom he supposes to be identical with Enoch, as a repository for the antediluvian arts and sciences, he says:  ’The pyramids are built of hard, well-cut stone.  They are of a very considerable elevation, and of a circular form, capacious at the base and narrow at the summit, in the fashion of cones.  They have no doors, and one is ignorant of the manner in which they have been constructed.’

In his journey up the Nile, Ibn Batuta never fails to give an account of every Moslem saint or theologian whom he meets, but only in one or two instances does he mention the antiquities, which, in that age, must have been still more conspicuous than now.  He even passes over the plain of Thebes without the slightest notice of the great temple of Karnak.  Disappointed in his plan of crossing the Red Sea to Jidda, he returned to Cairo, and at once set out for Syria.  Here, the first place of interest which he visited was Hebron, where he performed his devotions at the tombs of the patriarchs.  We learn that there were archaecological writings in those days, for he quotes from a work entitled ’The Torch of Hearts, on the Subject of the