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"Why do you take the huts of Ras-el-Bar down in winter ?" I asked the Governor. "Is the place flooded?" "Sometimes," he said. "But it is more on account of the sun. Everything would crack if it were up for a year."

As we approached the city, which in her decay looks like a warning to Venice, we could hear the muezzin going at all the minarets in Damietta. "What a very religious place!" I said. But the fancy bishop's son replied, "Damietta is not more religious than other places, but more deserted; therefore you hear all the muezzins." He himself, he said, had been awake nearly all night with the muezzin of the mosquito. He was a very strange man. He had spent three whole months in Mecca, staying with the Shereef, who took him there. Having been born and brought up in Constantinople, his Turkish accent was perfect, and he knew all the habits of the Turkish Moslems perfectly. It doubtless prevented inconvenient curiosity and inquiries that the Shereef of Mecca had him in his house, and knew that he was a Christian. He did not speak of Mecca as a very interesting place; but I think that he was a little censorious on the subject of Moslems, for he said that the only way in which the upper-class Egyptians keep Ramadan is by not offering you the customary cigarette

The Governor had ordered lunch for twelve because our train went at two. But he generally had it at two, so he mistrusted his cook. He carried his good nature and politeness to his guests so far that he sat in his kitchen with, I suppose, more or less of a staff, seeing that the lunch really was being prepared-I am sure without the least loss of dignity. He informed us of this as an excuse for his absence when he returned to us about one. In the interval the fancy bishop's son enlarged upon the subject of Mecca and Moslem institutions. But he did not say one thing about Mecca which brought it distinctly before my eyes. He had not noticed the things that matter. Some years before, I had been told of an American in the employ of the Standard Oil Company having visited Mecca, and did not believe it. I expect that he was the man. But

it had not been in connection with his business, as I used to be told.

After we had waited for an hour in the square drawingroom, with mastabas all round it, lunch was announced. The Governor had been reading his letters. One of them, which seemed to interest him very much, contained the catalogue of the sale of Harrod's models. He handed it

to us.

When lunch did come it was worthy of the Carlton, so was the waiting. We had no meal like it all the time we were in Egypt; it was so delightfully cooked, and the Governor's plate and linen were irreproachable. The menu he had ordered for us consisted, except the wine, entirely of local dainties. He wished to show us what Damietta could do, as a reproach to the Cairo and Luxor hotels, who order all their food from Austria. The menu was as follows: 1. Damietta rice served with chicken, liver, and curried pigeon. 2. Rodas, a toothsome Nile fish, served with new potatoes and a mayonaise as thick as butter, which would have secured its maker a handsome salary at the Ritz. 3. Damietta steak and green peas. 4. A cauliflower cooked to perfection in a wonderful creamy white sauce. 5. Damietta ducklings. 6. Blancmange with guava jelly (made from Damietta guavas), pistachios, and candied cherries. 7. Jaffa oranges, Yusuf effendis, and local blood-oranges, shaped like lemons, with juice as dark as burgundy; Damietta bananas.

All through the meal the wine flowed profusely-champagne, chablis, choice claret, and excellent burgundy. The appointments were French, except a rather English-looking sideboard. The Governor is one of those Moslems who do not consider that champagne is wine. I forget what he thought about chablis,

At the conclusion of the meal, at which he had been very witty, and showed many charming little politenesses, he washed his hands after the manner of the Arabian Nightsa gold bowl was brought in and held under his hands by one attendant, while another poured rose-water over them

from a gold izreek. Perhaps they were only silver gilt, but they were beautiful pieces of plate. Just as the cigarettes were brought he suddenly discovered that we must start at that moment if we wished to catch our train. Fortunately his launch was there to take us across to the station. And so we left Damietta, as in a dream.

P.S.-We thought we had left Damietta, but the very rich young man with a squint was at the railway station, with a bundle of his own photographs.

R

CHAPTER XXII

Rosetta

OSETTA, undiscovered by the tourist, is one of the most beautiful places in Egypt. As the traveller approaches it his hopes rise high, for the train takes him past lagoons, more gracious than those of Venice, in a setting of golden sand-hills and breezy palms. He is prepared in a way for the magnificence of the Rosetta reach. For sailing Rosetta has greater natural advantages than Assuan itself; the river is straighter and wider, the wind of the Mediterranean visits it nearly every day; it is also incomparably lovely, with its banks of palm-groves, enshrining mosques, and the white-domed tombs of saints.

I shall never forget sailing at Rosetta; we had served a strenuous apprenticeship for it; all the morning long we had tramped up and down the city, hunting out mediæval mansions, and the month was May, and the day was gloriously bright.

Rosetta is worthy of its graceful name-it is a rose among cities; there is nothing in Egypt like it except the cluster of old houses which survives from the village of Alexandria-a village of 5,000 souls a hundred years ago, turned by Mehemet Ali, with the magician's wand of a far-seeing autocrat, into a city of a thousand inhabitants for every day in the year.

To match it one would have to go to the Flanders of the Van Dycks: it is made up of old burnt-brick houses, recalling the Vieille Boucherie of Antwerp. The bricks being

The name has no real connection with roses: it is derived from the Arabic Rashid.

UNIV. OF

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At Rosetta the mosques are ancient, beautiful, and unrestored. There is no city in Egypt which has so many unrestored medieval buildings in good condition as Rosetta.

[p. 210

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