We have seen
so much of such misery before that I fear we begin to grow
callous.
Cairo, as a city, is most picturesque, with its commanding
citadel, and its hundreds of mosques with their slender spires and
conspicuous minarets; while surrounding all this in the desert lie
the ruins of older cities and of tombs and temples innumerable.
The Desert of Sahara reaches to the very gates of the city on the
east. The city lies between that and the Nile; then comes a narrow
strip of green about ten miles in width, and after that the
boundless Libyan Desert. The Pyramids stand upon the very edge of
this desert, so that it is sand, sand, sand! everywhere around the
city of the Caliphs, save and except this little green border
along the Nile. But indeed the whole of Egypt is only a narrow
green ribbon stretching along the river for some six hundred
miles, and widening at the delta, where the waters divide and
reach the sea by various channels. All the rest is sand. Egypt has
not more cultivable soil than Belgium, and would not make a fair
sized State with us.
The Khedive Ismail was determined to make Cairo a miniature Paris,
and we see much that recalls Paris to us. The new boulevards, the
opera-house, circus, cafes, new hotel--all show how much has
already been done in this direction; but he is in hard straits
just now, and the cry there, as elsewhere, is for retrenchment and
reform.
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