ON a bright, sunny day, early in March last, our Canadian party made the interesting excursion to Memphis and Sakkara. It is an interesting drive of three miles from Cairo to the Upper Egypt railway station, on the left bank of the Nile. One never tires of the picturesque aspect of the streets in the older parts of the city-the overhanging windows with their beautiful lattice

work, the ever-shifting crowd so full of life and colour, with their white and green turbans, blue gowns, crimson fezes, military

uniforms and the like.

Among the most striking figures are those of the stately sayses or running footmen-light, agile fellows who can keep ahead of the horse going at full speed for a wonderful distance. Their dress is almost always of snowy linen, which leaves the brown arms and legs bare. They have frequently a magnificently embroidered jacket and scarlet fez. Each carries a wand by day and a torch by night. It is their office to clear the way for the

VOL. XXXVII. No. 1.

carriage of their masters, which they do with loud cries of "to the right," to the left," "look out in front," with good-natured badinage to those slow to get out of the way. They remind us of the scriptural herald or forerunner who must prepare the way for his Master and Lord.

The strangest figures are the Cairene women muffled up to the eyes and wearing a sort of nosebag over the face, as shown more distinctly in one of the smaller cuts. The children are always

carried upon their shoulders, and sometimes are as airily

dressed, or not dressed, as in one of our cuts.

Among the most familiar figures are the water-bearers who, for the most part, carry this essential part of life in a disgusting looking sheepskin, or goatskin, looking like the bloated body of a drowned animal. The sherbet seller, on the contrary, carries his sickly, sweetish beverage in a porous jar, and goes through the streets clinking his brass cups and calling out sometimes almost in the words of Isaiah,

"Oh, ye thirsty," and sometimes, during the feast of Ramadan, he adds, "without money and without price," being paid therefor by some pious Moslem. Sometimes he exclaims, "the gift of God," recalling the words of our Lord to the Samaritan woman, "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, give me to drink, thou wouldst have asked of Him and He would have given thee living water."

The Nile bridge is always crowded with camels, donkeys,

and foot passengers, but especially so in the early morning. We counted sixty-eight camels on the bridge, laden with fresh clover, grain, and forage, besides donkeys innumerable, laden with oranges, lemons, dates, fresh vegetables of every sort, and all the varied supplies needed for a great city. As all these had to pay a toll for crossing the bridge, a very animated scene is exhibited of kneeling camels, chaffering and huxtering men and women, toll-takers and bridge-keepers,

CAIRENE WOMAN

IN WALKING

DRESS.

ties of eastern life. The garbs of blue and white, with the hundreds of white turbans or red fezes surmounting the dark faces and the many-coloured dresses, give the undulating crowd, buzzing like a bee-hive, somewhat the appearance of a vast bed of flowers shaken by the wind.

It is a
railway

ride of
fourteen

miles in stuffy little cars, in full view of the
great pyramids, to Bedrasheyn. On the left
stretches old Cairo, with its low hills studded
with ancient windmill towers, behind which
rises the long Mokattam ridge. To the right
stretches the Lybian Desert. At Bedrasheyn, a
vociferous crowd of Arab boys try to carry us
off by storm. We remain prudently within the
station inclosure, and depute one of our party, WOMAN AND CHILD.
Rev. Mr. Read, who enjoys the reputation of

making a shrewd bargain, to encounter the perils of the turbulent

mob. Donkeys being secured, we make a break through the crowd, mount our donkeys, and ride away as rapidly as possible.

We follow an embankment or dyke bordered on either side by wheat fields of brightest green, and traverse the vast plain, shaded by palms and strewn with blocks of granite, broken crockery, and crumbled fragments of sun-dried brick made from Nile mud. This is Memphis, the oldest and one of the greatest cities in the world, a city old in the time of Abraham and Joseph. "No other capital," says Miss Edwards, "dates back so far as this, or kept its place in history so long. Founded. four thousand years before our era,* it beheld the rise and fall of thirtyone dynasties; it survived the rule of the Persian, Greek, and Roman. It became the quarry from which the old and new Cairo were built. Now it is an utter desolationa few large rubbish heaps, a dozen or so of broken statues, and a name."

Even in the middle ages its ruins extended "half a day's journey" in every direction. A fallen colossus marks the site of the main entrance to the temple of Ptah, a

temple once as large and as magnificent as
that at Karnak. Of this, not a vestige re-
mains. Herodotus states that Sesostris-that
is, Rameses the Great-built a colossal statue
of himself in front of the great gateway. And
there it lies to the present day, the memorial
of that wonderful king, a gigantic trunk
forty-two feet long. For age after age it lay
as it fell, face downward, in the mud, every
year drowned in the annual inundation of
the Nile-a not unfitting type of the fallen
grandeur of Memphis. It has now been raised
out of the mud, and supported by a brick
pedestal. We climb a ladder, and pace up
and down on its gigantic breast-there is
ample room for six persons to walk about. The stony features

The

* Miss Edwards follows the medium chronology, that of Lepsius. chronology of Mariette is about 1,100 years longer, that of Wilkinson about 1,200 years shorter.

1

wear that calm, eternal smile that we notice on all the monuments of Rameses throughout Egypt, and which can even be seen on his mummied face in the museum of Gizeh.

We ride on through crowded mud villages, where the pretty, graceful children beset one for backsheesh, and through fertile fields, where fellahs are busy ploughing the rich, black soil, and by deft turns of the foot, guiding the water raised by shadoofs in narrow trenches to the beds of lettuce, onions, and other garden vegetables. We halt for a brief time near a well

to study the picturesque scene, and then ride on to the vast necropolis, which alone tells of the once teeming population of the city of Memphis. We soon leave the fertile valley and enter the desert-a vast stretch of yellow sand, strewn with flint flakes, potsherds, bleached