is the mosque: the sanctuary, to which he confines the term mosque," is only one portion of it, the liwân. If only this part formed the mosque you would not be compelled to take off your shoes (or put on overshoes) until you came to it, whereas this has to be done the moment you enter the mosque precincts. His inaccuracy as an observer is shown again immediately below, where he says, "It is always the mihrab which is decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally little columns of lapis-lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from it." The mihrab is sometimes, as at El Azhar itself, hardly decorated at all, and the little blue columns, which are certainly a feature of many a mihrab, are not made of lapis-lazuli, but of turquoise-blue faïence. It is difficult to forgive a man, who is so fond of using colourepithets, for confusing the utterly different turquoise and lapis-lazuli blues.

With this we may pass from the subject of mosques, merely pointing out that it is absurd on p. 24, to talk of "the tall aerial minarets rising to a prodigious height into the twilight sky." One could not use the epithet prodigious about any of them except perhaps those of the Mosque of Mehemet Ali on the Citadel, which is avowedly a modern imitation of the mosques of Constantinople. As a class, Egyptian minarets are low, rising but little above the roofs of the mosques.

In his anxiety to gird at the English, M. Loti lays all the troubles of rainage and drainage at their door. In the matter of rain he contradicts himself. For on p. 109, still speaking of Cairo, he says, " It is always thus in the springtime of this rainless country," having already on p. 5 accused the English of bringing "the humidity of their own misty isles" over it by their irrigation works. The statistics of meteorologists prove that there has been no change in the climate.

"C'est toujours le mihrab qui est orné avec la plus minutieuse richesse: en général des colonnettes de lapis, intensement bleues, s'y détachent en relief." * "Des grands minarets aériens qui s'élancent prodigieusement haut dans le ciel crépusculaire."

"C'est toujours ainsi, le printemps de ce pays sans pluie."

"Les nouveaux envahisseurs de ce pays ont apporté sans doute l'humidité de leur île brumeuse, en changeant le régime des eaux du vieux Nil," etc

From rainage he passes to drainage. "But, nevertheless, what ruins, what filth, what rubbish! How present is the sense of impending dissolution! And what is this? Large pools of water in the middle of the road! Granted that there is more rain here than formerly, since the valley of the Nile has been artificially irrigated, it still seems almost impossible that there should be all this black water, into which our carriage sinks to the very axles; for it is a clear week since any serious quantity of rain fell. It would seem that the new masters of this land, albeit the cost of annual upkeep has risen in their hands to the sum of £15,000,000, have given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to the knee make their way through this already pestilential water, which must be hatching for them fever and death." 1

This is a most ignorant, if innocent, perversion of facts. All over the world the English are known to be more careful than any nation about drainage, and at Cairo the ConsulGeneral and the unofficial British residents vie with each other in their anxiety to have the place properly drained. But they are met by a stone wall of opposition from certain of the nations who enjoy Capitulation privileges. The Greek and the Greco-Levantine, who are very numerously represented, frankly prefer cesspools to drainage, and even, if there was a main drain running past their houses, the lowerclass Levantines would not allow their houses to be connected with it. This is proved by what happens at Alexandria where there is some system of drainage, and where there are

"Cependant, que de ruines, d'immondices, de décombres! Comme on sent que tout cela se meurt ! . . . Et puis quoi : des lacs maintenant, en pleine rue! On sait bien qu'il pleut ici beaucoup plus que jadis, depuis que la vallée du Nil est artificiellement inondée; mais c'est invraisemblable quand même, toute cette eau noire où notre voiture s'enfonce jusqu'aux essieux, car il y a huit jours que n'est tombée une averse un peu sérieuse. Alors les nouveaux maîtres n'ont pas songé au drainage, dans ce pays dont le budget d'entretien annuel a été porté par leurs soins à quinze millions de livres ?-Et les bons Arabes, avec patience, sans murmurer, retroussent leurs robes, jambes nues jusqu'aux genoux, pour cheminer au milieu de cette eau déjá pestilentielle, qui doit couver pour eux des fièvres et de la mort."

many people who submit to paying rates for it, but will not have their houses drained. One of the great arguments against the continuation of the Capitulations lies in the difficulties the small nations interpose in the way of the most necessary municipal reforms. Cairo has no municipality; it has a Governor instead.1

It is no wonder that the Ismailia quarter, where the chief hotels and other modern buildings lie, is better drained than the Arab city, for it is practically a Franco-British city, and the French and English business men, who are its permanent residents, are eager to help the authorities in taking care of its well-being.

The fustian about the patience of the good Arabs on the subject of "pestilential water which must be hatching for them fever and death," is almost pathetically ludicrous. The good Arab thinks the idea of standing water being pestilential a tiresome fad of the English. Where he is left to himself he always has a pond, manure-heap, and dust-heap combined in his towns, and the Bedâwins camp beside it, as in the great city of Tanta. No matter how green its water, he I will drink it unfiltered. The stagnant canal which ran through the city of Cairo, the swampy pools in the Ezbekiya Gardens, would be there still if the Arabs had their way.

His tirade against factories conveys another unjust implication against the English. The great sugar factories you see as you go up the Nile are French, not English, and one of them, at any rate, caused the destruction of a priceless monument of the Pharaohs. Ismail Pasha gave the concessionaire the monument as a quarry, and he pulled it down to erect the sugar factory with its stones.

Many a fine Arab mansion in Cairo was pulled down by French dealers and collectors in the days of the French ascendancy, to transfer its meshrebiya work and its marbles to France. The Maison de France itself, the house of the French Consul-General, must have involved the destruction of at least a dozen.

And even supposing that the barrages built by the English 1 By the time this book appears, this may have been altered.

to prevent the waste of the Nile water had made the climate moister, on the one hand this would be considered a great advantage by the Egyptians, and on the other it must be remembered that the French did erect barrages like the Delta Barrage below Cairo, only they never held water. Also that they would have pulled down the pyramids of Ghizeh to build them, and actually tried to do so, but found it impossible. It was Lord Cromer who ended the age of vandalism. Even M. Loti admits that the restoration of the Cairo mosques is due to the English.

The Ismailia part of Cairo did not strike me as "a medley of all styles." It struck me as an attempt, more successful in some places and less successful in others, to create an Egyptian Paris. Nor did I see innumerable public-houses. They are ten times more numerous in Paris. In Cairo it is the chemist, not the publican, who monopolises every street corner. Cairo may be, as M. Loti declares, a sink of vice, but you do not see much of it, unless you go into the street of the Ezbekiya, or the Fishmarket Quarter, or certain notorious

bars.

You seldom analyse any statement in this book without finding it thin and inexact. You often find that the author is merely balancing sentences and piling up words, which sound well but have no exact meaning.

But it is much easier to let this kind of thing pass than such a bull as the following, where he is talking about the saints buried in the ancient mosques of Cairo, such as "Some priest rendered admirable by his virtues, or perhaps a khedive of earlier times, or a soldier, or a martyr." The title of Khedive is not yet fifty years old: it was bestowed for very substantial considerations by the then Sultan, upon Ismail Pasha in 1867. It was not borne by Mehemet Ali, Ibrahim, Abbas I., or Said, who had preceded him in the office of Viceroy of Egypt after its conquest from the Turks; it is a childish mistake to speak of the medieval Caliphs as Khedives.

He is hardly less futile in his attempt to present a picture of a pylon to the mind of the reader. Pylons are thus

" 1

tersely defined by Budge: "The pylon consisted of a massive doorway and two towers." M. Loti says: "Pylons are monumental walls in the form of a trapezium with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphics, which the Egyptians used to place at either side of their porticoes and long avenues.' This is hopeless floundering from beginning to end. The French use the word trapèze, as the later Greek geometricians used it, in the sense of a quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides. But there is no reason why a pylon should not have both pairs of sides parallel, and in fact it generally does, so the word trapèze should not be used. And in any case it is grotesque to describe a pylon, which (as its Greek name betokens) is a glorified gate, as a monumental wall. Secondly, pylons—and I have examined scores of them are not by any means always decorated, let alone covered, with hieroglyphics; and in the third place, pylons were never placed on either side of the porticoes and avenues" of temples. They always stand right across the roadway which leads into the temple.

But M. Loti is above facts. Plain people might be annoyed by his habit of always speaking of Thebes when he means Karnak. He is not wrong, technically, because the Karnak of to-day did form part of ancient Thebes; but so did Luxor, and he speaks of Louxor. I think personally that it would be only in accordance with poetical justice if the Government of Egypt were to decree that Luxor and Karnak were to be called East Thebes and Thebes West Thebes, as they are in maps of ancient Thebes. But M. Loti has little more right to call Karnak Thebes without a word of explanation than he has to call Tunis Carthage. To continually speak of the temple of Amen at Thebes is merely confusing, for to the world it is the great temple of Karnak; and as it happens to be the world's greatest temple, the world has a right to a voice in the matter.

I could multiply examples to show how uninformed upon

"Des pylônes-qui sont, comme on sait, les monumentales murailles, en orme de trapèze à large base et toutes couvertes d'hieroglyphes, que les Égyptiens plaçaient de chaque côté de leurs portiques ou de leurs avenues."