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duced under this water with the happiest effect-there is nothing to equal it at Earl's Court. I should have said that the man who built this tomb had certainly seen the splendid Etruscan tombs of Caere, if there did not seem to be equally good evidence that he had seen the tombs of Westminster Abbey, for that altar tomb in the wall, with its lions at head and foot, looked like a work of the Middle Ages. The situation was saved by there being canopic jars under the bier -the jars used by the Egyptians to receive the parts of the body which would not embalm. The mixture of styles on that tomb was only Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Etruscan; the carvings were spirited and effective. They were almost coarse in execution, but the sandstone was of a charming colour; and as one looked back on it from the tombdoor, and through the Ptolemaic columns, the effect of that staircase, with the electric lights shining like lilies through its conduits of clear running water, was magical.

We stepped from that chamber into a corridor of tombs on the Saracenic plan. Clear water was flowing everywhere, clear as crystal. It seemed a profanation when the Ghaffir, a Nubian, who looked as if he had been blacked, lighted a fresh cigarette from the stump of the old one and threw the paper saturated by his lips into its pure current. Here there was another handsome tomb with three lunettes divided by three columns. Catacombs radiated from the main tomb all round-some had never had the marble slabs which closed them removed, and the names scribbled on them in red chalk were the names of the occupants, whose relations would not go to the expense of having them engraved, but just wrote them. After all, what did it signify in the days before electric light? It is hard to believe that the ancients had nothing better than the light emitted by fibres soaked in olive oil, when they went to all this trouble over their tombs. Their ideas of cause and effect must have been different from ours, or they could never have taken so much trouble about these obscure passages. Some of the carvings of this tomb were only half finished. This is not surprising, as experts say that the chief sepulchres in the tomb were never occupied,

though hundreds of dependants seem to have been buried round. As there is so much moisture there are some horrible decaying bones.

I am glad to have seen this tomb. The famous mortuary galleries of Palazzolo Acreide in Sicily may have been something like this when they were made.

When we emerged from that fantastic and complete mausoleum of a wealthy Alexandrine in the city's prime, we could not help being struck by the poverty and vulgarity of the quarter which surrounded it. It was a tangled mass of puff-bread, onions, small cucumbers, cocoa-nuts, monkeynuts, fried fish, sugar cane, and tarbooshes. Its one splash of colour was the approach to a low theatre with its furious posters.

I should imagine that St. Menas, a few hours from Alexandria, which Mr. Ewald Falls calls the ancient Egyptian Lourdes, must be more interesting than any of the Egyptian remains round Alexandria. He quotes Severus as saying that the sanctuary of St. Menas was more splendid than any similar building in ancient Christian Egypt, not even excepting Alexandria. Very few explorers had ever visited it before Mr. Falls and the Rev. C. M. Kaufmann in the summer of 1905 halted there in the course of a thirty-days' camel trip in the Auladali desert, because Mr. Kaufmann was suffering so from malnutrition.

They discovered the long-lost city-a marble city buried in the desert sand-by Mr. Falls noticing the relief of a camel's head on a kom, with fragments of broken pottery. He ran back to Mr. Kaufmann, crying out, “This, Charley, ought to be the lost city!" The discovery was made in the summer, but Mr. Kaufmann was so ill that they could not stay there. However, they went back five months later, with the permission of the Ministry and the support of the Khedive, and excavated the famous basilica of Arcadius. The Bedawin were at first hostile to the operations, because they thought a big European city would come there, and that the excavators were digging for the treasure, guarded by big thick snakes, which they themselves had always been trying to find. But the

The

Bedawin afterwards became their devoted workmen. results of the excavation I must give in Mr. Falls's own words from a beautifully illustrated article in the Cairo Sphinx.

EXTRACT FROM "THE SPHINX," JANUARY 16, 1909

"At the same time work began on the large apse in the centre. It was hard work before the white, resplendent basilica of Arcadius, supported by fifty marble columns, came to light. At the end of this huge building, according to the old Arab manuscript, lay the tomb of the saint, the marble grave of the patron of the Lybian desert and of Alexandria. And, indeed, one day in January 1906, on the very spot, the entrance of a sort of cellar was discovered, so small that scarcely one man could enter. It took over a month to open a fine subterranean portico which leads deep under the church, and our satisfaction was great when first we deciphered on the walls near the crypt the Greek acclamations of the pilgrims, 'Father, help us, The Lord may help,' and so forth.

"The principal features of further work were then as follows: After the complete clearing of the basilica of Arcadius and the connecting of the elder basilica with the holy well, the crypt, and the tomb, the baptistery of Menas city was excavated. In 1906 and 1907 a part of the monastery and one of the cemeteries of Karm Abou Mina, with a fine old basilica on the north-east, were opened, and also many interesting cisterns, private houses, etc.

"Our last concluding finds in determining this city, the real Lourdes of ancient Egypt, to which once journeyed the imperial daughter of Byzane, to be cured of leprosy, were the baths for the sick and the afflicted. A group of them, connected with large therma and hypokaustea, lay in a fine marble basilica; and in this church are yet to be seen the two small tanks where the holy water was dispensed to the pilgrims. Take of Menas beautiful water,' says a Greek hexameter inscribed by a traveller from Smyrna, 'and pain will leave you.'”

All this is specially interesting, because Egypt has hardly any Christian ruins of pre-Byzantine times which are not inconspicuous and ruinous, though she played such an important part in the development of Christianity.

Modern Alexandrians are often like the portraits that come out of Ptolemaic tombs, showing how little the type of villany has changed. It looks extra odd in Alexandria, where there are police regulating the traffic like they do in London, though they wear white clothes in May-a thing which I should not like to do in that climate after sundown; I always took an overcoat if I was going to be out after tea.

Alexandria has a beautiful bay between the fort of Silsileh and the fort of Kait Bey, which stands on the site of the ancient Pharos. But it is rather spoiled by a public garden of land reclaimed from its waters, which is innocent of one blade of green, and has not yet got beyond the dust-heap stage. Otherwise, from its bold crescent it would be like the Bay of Naples, with Lochias standing for Posilippo and Kait Bey's fort for the Castel del Uovo. Once in a way you see a European driving through this "park" in a dogcart, with a native coachman, whose jet-black hands and face make a fine contrast to his snow-white clothes and puggarree; but generally there is nothing more exciting than a boy riding on a donkey, sitting just over its rudder, and the usual street Arabs, with long robes and bare feet, gambling with the straitened means at their disposal. Our hotel commanded a view of this eastern bay. Our bedroom had a pleasant arcaded balcony which tempted us to dwell on it. Cleopatra's palace might have stood on this very spot, with the theatre behind it, and the museum or hall of culture, which contained the famous library, behind that and a little to the left.

But Cleopatra is as completely forgotten in Alexandria as elsewhere in Egypt now. Nobody tries to show you the place where she sported with Mark Antony or committed suicide over him; indeed, when you are in this part of the town, if it were not for the ocular evidence of Kait Bey's fort rising white against the blue sky and blue sea, on the

point between the two harbours, and a row of minarets in the town which has grown up on the Heptastadium built by the great Alexander (or another) to connect the island of the Pharos with the mainland, one might not be in Egypt at all.

And in Kait Bey's fort, if it were not for the mosque, which is its most conspicuous building, one might well be in Sicily standing on the castle of Maniace looking over the waters of the great harbour where Athens fell. The fort looks best from the outside; indeed, it would be hardly worth while to take the trouble to get the permesso for entering it, were it not that it is the site of the lighthouse of the Ptolemies, the famous Pharos of Alexandria, which, till it was thrown down by the elements seven hundred years ago, rose in receding tiers of pure white marble. It was square, and each storey diminished in size, with a gallery running round it to occupy the unused area. Inside, you mounted to the top, as you used to in the fallen campanile at Venice, by a ramp instead of stairs. Horses and chariots could ascend it. It stood for nearly fifteen hundred years, and, when the water is very clear and calm, boatmen rowing to Kait Bey's fort claim to have seen its marbles bearded with seaweed. I could see no trace of them from the roof of the fort, though the day was favourable, and I am familiar, from Syracuse, with submerged fragments of masonry. is said that the Pharos, when its time came, simply fell into the sea from the rock where the fort now stands.

The bazars of Alexandria are disappointing, except for buying Arab cottons, though parts of them are sufficiently Oriental and fascinating to those who have never seen the bazars of places like Cairo and Tunis.

The few old houses which remain of the mediæval Alexandria-mansions like you get at Rosetta, built of burnt brick with loggias of ancient columns-are near Kait Bey's fort. Here, too, on the point between the two harbours, is the khedivial palace of Ras-el-Tin, where the Prince of Egypt holds levees for Alexandrians. It is a plain barrack, with a gingerbread Egyptian gate. It has rather a nice

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