plant trees, so that the landscape is varied by large groves of
date-palms, and the sycamores and other trees which surround the
villages and give shade to the paths and canal banks. It is a pastoral
land, luxuriantly green; and how beautiful it is as the night falls,
and the last of the sunset lingers in the dew-laden air, wreathed with
the smoke of many fires; and, as the stars one by one appear in the
darkening sky, and the labour of the field ceases, the lowing cattle
wend their slow ways toward the villages and the bull-frogs in their
thousands raise their evensong. No scenery in the world has, to my
mind, such mellow and serene beauty as these farm-lands of Lower
Egypt, and in a later chapter I will tell you more about them, and of
the simple people whose life is spent in the fields.




CHAPTER III

CAIRO--I


Usually its capital may be taken as typical of its country; but in
Egypt this is not so. Cairo is essentially different from anything
else in Egypt, not only in its buildings and architecture, but in the
type and mode of life of its inhabitants.

How shall I give you any real idea of a city which is often considered
to be the most beautiful Oriental capital in the world, as it is
certainly one of the most interesting? From a distance, looking across
the fields of Shoubra,[2] it is very beautiful, especially at sunset,