[p.10]Egypt, this City of Misnomers, whose dry docks are ever wet, and whose marble fountain is eternally dry, whose “Cleopatra’s Needle"[FN13] is neither a needle nor Cleopatra’s; whose “Pompey’s Pillar” never had any earthly connection with Pompey; and whose Cleopatra’s Baths are, according to veracious travellers, no baths at all.  Yet it is a wonderful place, this “Libyan suburb” of our day, this outpost of civilisation planted upon the skirts of barbarism, this Osiris seated side by side with Typhon, his great old enemy.  Still may be said of it, “it ever beareth something new[FN#14];” and Alexandria, a threadbare subject in Bruce’s time, is even yet, from its perpetual changes, a fit field for modern description.[FN#15]

[p.11]The better to blind the inquisitive eyes of servants and visitors, my friend, Larking, lodged me in an out-house, where I could revel in the utmost freedom of life and manners.  And although some Armenian Dragoman, a restless spy like all his race, occasionally remarked voila un Persan diablement degage, none, except those who were entrusted with the secret, had any idea of the part I was playing.  The domestics, devout Moslems, pronounced me an ’Ajami,[FN#16] a kind of Mohammedan, not a good one like themselves, but, still better than nothing.  I lost no time in securing the assistance of a Shaykh,[FN#17] and plunged once more into the intricacies of the Faith; revived my recollections of religious ablutions, read the Koran, and again became an adept in the art of prostration.  My leisure hours were employed in visiting the baths and coffee-houses, in attending the bazars, and in shopping,-an operation which hereabouts consists of sitting upon a chapman’s counter, smoking, sipping coffee, and telling your beads the while, to show that you are not of the slaves for whom time is made; in fact, in pitting your patience against that of your adversary, the vendor.  I found time for a short excursion to a country village on the banks of the canal; nor was an opportunity of seeing “Al-nahl,” the “Bee-dance;” neglected, for it would be some months before my eyes might dwell on such a pleasant spectacle again.  “Delicias videam, Nile jocose, tuas!”

Careful of graver matters, I attended the mosque, and visited the venerable localities in which modern Alexandria abounds.  Pilgrimaging Moslems are here

[p.12]shown the tomb of Al-nabi Daniyal (Daniel the Prophet), discovered upon a spot where the late Sultan Mahmud dreamed that he saw an ancient man at prayer.[FN#18] Sikandar al-Rumi, the Moslem Alexander the Great, of course left his bones in the place bearing his name, or, as he ought to have done so, bones have been found for him.  Alexandria also boasts of two celebrated Walis-holy men.  One is Mohammed al-Busiri, the author of a poem called Al-Burdah, universally read by the world of Islam, and locally recited at funerals and on other solemn occasions.  The other is Abu Abbas al-Andalusi, a sage and saint of the first water, at whose tomb prayer is never breathed in vain.