the loveliest air of the Inland Sea, whose sparkling blue and purple
haze spread charms even on N. Africa's beldame features, and now we are
sitting silent and still, listening to the monotonous melody of the
East-the soft night-breeze wandering through starlit skies and tufted
trees, with a voice of melancholy meaning.

And this is the Arab's Kayf. The savouring of animal existence; the
passive enjoyment of mere sense; the pleasant languor, the dreamy
tranquillity, the airy castle-building, which in Asia stand in lieu of
the vigorous, intensive, passionate life of Europe. It is the result of
a lively, impressible, excitable nature, and exquisite sensibility of
nerve; it argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern
regions, where happiness is placed in the exertion of mental and
physical powers; where Ernst ist das Leben; where niggard earth
commands ceaseless sweat of face, and damp chill air demands perpetual
excitement, exercise, or change, or adventure, or dissipation, for want
of something better. In the East, man wants but rest and shade: upon
the banks of a bubbling stream, or under the cool shelter of a perfumed
tree, he is perfectly happy, smoking a pipe, or sipping a cup of
coffee, or drinking a glass of sherbet, but above all things deranging
body and mind as little as possible; the trouble of conversations, the
displeasures of memory, and the vanity of thought being the most
unpleasant interruptions to his Kayf. No wonder that "Kayf" is a word
untranslatable in our mother-tongue![FN#12]

"Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytelenen."

Let others describe the once famous Capital of

[p.10]Egypt, this City of Misnomers, whose dry docks are ever wet, and