ᎢᎻᎬ ᎠᎬᏚᎬᎡᎢ,

"With a hoste of furious fancies,
Whereof I am Commander,

With a burning spear,

And a horse of the ayr,

To the wilderness I wander."

Mad Tom of Bedlam.

"Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh, when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the pricks, when we can walk on roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be eagles?"-KEATS.

"For us the winds do blow,

The earth doth rest, heaven move and fountains flow:
Nothing we see but means our good,

As our delight, or as our treasure,

The whole is either our cupboard of food,

Or cabinet of pleasure."-GEORGE HERBERT.

"And they three passed over the white sands between the rocks, silent as the shadows."-Coleridge.

CHAPTER I.

GRAND CAIRO.

"THE camels are ready," said the Commander, our dragoman.

And I turned for a last glimpse of Cairo from the lofty window of the hotel over the Uzbeekeeyah, or public garden. The sun was sinking toward the Pyramids, and my eyes, that perceived their faint outline through the warm air, were fascinated for the last time by their grandeur and mystery.

I held a letter in my hand. It was dated several weeks before in Berlin, and its incredible tales of cold, thin twilight for day, of leafless trees, and of bitter and blasting winds, were like ice in the sherbet of the oriental scene my eyes were draining.

Beneath the balcony was the rounded fulness of acacia groves, and glancing along the lights and shadows of the avenues, I marked the costumes whose picturesqueness is poetry. The glaring

white walls of plaster palaces, and the hareems of pachas rose irregularly beyond, cool with dark green blinds, and relieving the slim minarets that played, fountains of grace, in the brilliant air. It was a great metropolis, but silent as Venice. Only the "ha-ha" of the donkey-boys, the guttural growl of the camels, or the sharp crack of the runner's whip that precedes a carriage, jarred the pensive silence of the sun.

I read another passage in the wintry letter I held and remembered Berlin, Europe, and the North, as spirits in paradise recall the glacial limbo of the Inferno.

"The camels are ready," said the sententious Commander.

66

Yes," answered the Howadji, and stepped out upon the balcony.

The Arabian poets celebrate the beauty of Cairo, "Misr, without an equal, the mother of the world, the superb town, the holy city, the delight of the imagination, greatest among the great, whose splendour and opulence made the Prophet smile."

Nor the Prophet only. For even to Frank and Infidel eyes it is the most beautiful of eastern cities.

It is not so purely oriental as Damascus, nor can it rival the splendour of the Syrian capital as seen

from a distance; but, architecturally, Cairo is the triumph of the Arabian genius. It woos the eye and admiration of the stranger with more than Muslim propriety. Damascus is a dream of beauty as you approach it. But the secret charm of that beauty, when you are within the walls, is discovered only by penetrating deeper and farther into its exquisite courts, and gardens, and interiors, as you must strip away the veils and clumsy outer robes to behold the beauty of the Circassian or Georgian slave.

Prince Soltikoff, a Russian Sybarite, who winters upon the Nile as Englishmen summer upon the Rhine, agreed that, to the eye of the stranger in its streets, Cairo was unsurpassed.

"But Ispahan?" I suggested: for the Prince chats of Persia as men gossip of Paris, and illuminates his conversation with the glory of the Ganges.

"Persia has nothing so fair," replied the Prince. "Leave Ispahan and Teheran unvisited save by your imagination, and always take Cairo as the keynote of your eastern recollections.'

It is built upon the edge of the desert, as other cities stand upon the sea-shore. The sand stretches to the walls, girdling "the delight of the imagination" with a mystery and silence profounder than that of the ocean.