ALEXANDRIA.

p. 211]

burnt confers much distinction on it, for Egypt is a mud-brick country. Cities have survived since the days of Rameses the Great, built of no more durable material than mud cut into ingots; but that was at Thebes and other desert capitals, where rain is as rare as rubies. Rosetta, like Alexandria, is climatically not of Egypt at all; it is a city of the Mediterranean littoral; in this favoured strip you have the scenery, and not a few of the flowers, of Sicily.

What of those palaces of Rosetta? They rise from colonnades that are purely ornamental; their heavy columns, pirated from Ptolemaic temples, are engaged, and yield but shallow and narrow recesses-mere statue niches, without their marble tenants. Above their colonnades are three storeys, each beetling over the storey below it with mediæval perverseness. One supposes that this was a device to console the ladies of the harem for the absence of the oriels of meshrebiya lattice-work, from which the odalisques in Cairo saw the gay festivals and busy working-days of the Gamaliya. There is hardly one such oriel in Rosetta, where all the numerous windows are filled with shutters of meshrebiya work like the panels in a mosque screen.

The basement colonnade must not be dismissed too lightly; it is often of great beauty and architectural ambition. It may have a portal, for instance, like the portals of Taormina, a bold rectangle which does not reach high, with ornamental brick work not seldom laid out in diamonds round the doorway, and a band of oak carried across the head of the doorway, engraved in antique letters with a text from the Koran. Occasionally the text is incised on a panel of stone, and the wide portal is of fine old masonry. The door itself fills only a small round-headed arch, but it will be decorated with the bold geometrical patterns in hard-wood overlays, which for four centuries have been the favoured pulpit decorations of Cairo mosques. Straight up from the door, in every house, a dark strip of narrow, vaulted stairway leads to the interior, which begins one storey up.

Many of these houses are of great size, solid cubes of building, like the vast mansions, which the freebooters of St.

Malo put up with their ill-gotten gains in the piping eighteenth century. It is difficult to convey to a reader their dignity and decorativeness, the former depending on their massive proportions, the latter on their singularly naïve ornamentation. The ceilings of the colonnades, for example, are of dark wood, with the same fine arabesque overlays as the doors. The architect who built these walls understood the value of breaking up flat surfaces. Here he sunk a panel with some kind of ornament, there inserted a beam boldly carved with a text from the Koran; every yard of the elevation he broke with a fine course of woodwork. In the structural bricks, which have so successfully defied the centuries, and the winds and moisture of the Delta, are sunk other bricks, vari-coloured, in every arabesque and moresque pattern, the most beautiful being the ogee arch immortalised in Venetian windows; but the three prime characteristics in these houses are the overhanging storeys, the shutters of fine meshrebiya work, which fills every window, and the colonnades of temple pillars below.

Where did these pillars come from? Rosetta was a foundation of the Saracen conquerors. There was no classical city, on the spot, for them to take over. But there was a mysterious Bolbitine which, some say, stood where the mosque of Abû Mandûr makes the culminating note in the most beautiful picture on the Nile; and some prefer to locate at Fort St. Julien, which betrayed to the world the erst-unfathomable secrets of old Egypt, by the discovery in its precincts of the Rosetta Stone; of which anon. But if Bolbitine lay north at Fort St. Julien, what about Mandur? what of the prostrate columns which break the roadways of Rosetta streets? what of the colonnades which line the quiet alleys, almost overarched above, which look as if you had only to walk down them to find yourself in the Middle Ages at the end? Orientals do not pass in and out of their houses much, so you can look down alley after alley without seeing a single figure to break your vision. Indeed, if you saw them they might well leave it unbroken, for the costume of the Arab is little changed to-day from the long yesterday of

the Caliphate; and here in Rosetta there is a grace not universal in Egypt. You see men working in the elegant costumes confined to the saises of the rich at Cairo-the fine shirts, the embroidered waistcoats, the generous pantaloons, the gay caps.

Here and there in Cairo, the city of matchless mosques, you find a too-short street of old Mameluke houses with glorious oriels of carved and fretted and latticed woodwork in bewildering profusion-Oriental fantasias upon the same theme as the old timber houses of Chester and Rouen; but they are fragments almost lost in the great city. Rosetta at the back of its bazar is a city of one age-a city of these noble old mansions of Arabian art, with long colonnades recalling the hypostyle halls of the ancient Egyptian temples. Their brick is of a curious dark red. Without the firing, which gives it its rich colour, the brick could not have stood the moisture of the Delta.

There are few cities so entirely antique as Rosetta, where you have half a mile square of old houses broken only by the streets in which they stand. It can but be compared to the old part of Rouen round the Halles.

Rosetta as a city consists of this aristocratic quarter of dwellings, the bazar, and the quay. No business of exporting and importing disfigures, with the hideous adjuncts of modern docks, the ancient port, which when Mehemet Ali wrested Egypt from the Turk had five times the population of Alexandria. The Nile bears nothing more important on its bosom than gyassas of artisans or peasants, but the native craft are launched, and repaired, and broken up, and beached along the whole front. It is the dockyard of the gyassa.

The bazar of Rosetta is as unspoiled as that of Omdurman, though they differ as places with such a gulf of time and space set between them would. It is purely native. It has no native wares selected irrespective of use to tempt the tourist's eye; it has no cheap European wares to seduce the Arab from his own durable, suitable, picturesque, hand-made articles. Here you have the native in fellah simplicity as you find him only where the white man never goes-able to

supply all his wants himself, regardless of whether there is any one in the world besides himself or not. The bazar of Rosetta! How shall I describe it? It is very long; it winds as inconsequently as an Arab bazar should; it is open here, there shaded by a loosely boarded roof, or a loosely strung mat of palm leaves, or a trellis grown with young vine leaves. The shops are of the larger order, open-fronted, of course, and each with its dikker outside it, on which the owner sits, mostly chatting with or waiting for customers. The tradesmen are those who supply the simplest wants: the tinker, the coppersmith, the shoemaker, even the tailor-though Arabs are apt to make their own clothes-with the vendors of vegetables, of poor Arab hosiery, and of cottons dominated by speckled red handkerchiefs-headkerchiefs. The shoes are distinctive, for the red and yellow goat-skin slippers are almost excluded by a stout patent leather as stiff as cowhide.

The bazars are broken by many old houses, by mosques and mills. The mills of Rosetta deserve a word to themselves. I saw oil-mills and flour-mills much alike. The mill would be separated from the street by an important and picturesque entrance like a khan's; the mill chamber would have for an entrance on each side a fine arch with a trefoil head, and all round would have moresque arches inlaid or overlaid on its walls. There might be another such chamber behind it, and, beyond that, the colonnaded courtyard where the beasts were stabled. In the mill chamber would be sakiyas grinding the oil-seed or grain with the same gear as the sakiyas for driving waterwheels, and all in a subdued light.

Rosetta is rich in mosques, but the others are overshadowed by the Sakhlûn mosque, which is very fine and old-a mosque after the order of the grand mosque of Kairouan, the holy city of Africa-and the old mosques of Amr and ElAzhar at Cairo, though its court is minute compared to theirs.

I was amazed by my first glimpse of the interior, as I was passing through the bazar, for the outer walls gave no indication of its extent or its character. The minaret is old and fantastic; its long walls, mere curtains of crumbling brick as