as a testimony to the wealth, perseverance, engineering skill, and consummate vulgarity of the people who removed them.

And thou, Cleopatra's Needle, that hadst thrid
Great skirts of Time ere she and Antony hid
Dead hope!-hast thou too reached, surviving death,
A city of sweet speech scorned, on whose chill stone
Keats withered, Coleridge pined, and Chatterton,
Breadless, with poison froze the god-fired breath?"

-D. G. ROSSETTI.

Away to the south-west, crossing again the square, and passing through one of the gates of the town, we come upon a high eminence, crowned by the pillar which we may call Pompey's or Diocletian's with almost equal inaccuracy. That it had nothing to do with the great Pompey may be admitted; for not only did he never reach Alexandria, but he only came to Egypt itself to be defeated and killed near the modern Port Said; and certainly Alexandrians were the least likely of people to raise a column to a defeated hero. Nor has Diocletian much more right to have his name associated with it. It is possible, or indeed even probable, that, as it stands to-day, with its ungainly base and vulgar capital, it was erected in honour of the persecuting Emperor, who at last staid. his hand. It may, too, have been still further disfigured by the statue, either of himself, or, as others relate, of his horse, whose stumbling was interpreted as the omen which saved the city. But all this does not justify the title of Diocletian to a column which formed part of a building erected five hundred years before he was born. Similar nomenclature would justify the absurd title of Cleopatra's Needle, or, for that matter, Wilson's Needle, to the obelisk of Thothmes III. The column was a part of the Serapeum. On the highest point of Rhacotis, Ptolemy Philadelphus placed the statue of Serapis, and around it grew the Acropolis of the Greek town. The cult of the god (Osiris-Apis-Serapis) died hard

Distant View of Pompey's Pillar.

in the city of Alexandria. Long after the religion of the Cross had driven the idolaters from the rest of the town, those who still resisted it found their refuge here. Here was their Library, with volumes greater in number at least than those

D

which had been already burnt. Here mixed the philosophies of Egypt and of Greece, hurling their Parthian shafts at their victorious foe. And when "the pious indignation of Theophilus" could no longer restrain itself at the furious raging of the heathen, it was here that he pursued them; it was their temple which they turned into a fortress, and where they found a horrible alternation to their sufferings in torturing their Christian prisoners at the foot of the statue of their god. Nothing else remains of the arched portico, the hundred steps which led to it, the stately halls, or the marvellous statues. Through two thousand years the column has looked down upon the struggles of rival creeds and rival empires. Greek and Roman, Turk and Arab, Infidel and Christian, Jew and Moslem, have each struggled at its feet; and in the city of Alexander, where Cæsar and Bonaparte triumphed, it remains the one memorial which survives the British occupation.

CHAPTER III.

Ramleh-Mahmoudieh Canal-Nicopolis-An Egyptian judge-The luxury of the law-Consular protection or free-trade in crime-The temple of Arsinoe-The hair of Berenice-An early Christian cemetery.

T was at the particular request of the Sketcher that the party agreed to miss

Ramleh. The Scribbler maintained that it was a waste of precious time; that the so-called Brighton of Alexandria was a Cockneyfied desert, with houses scattered like tombs in a cemetery, wherein the pious Alexandrians secluded themselves, to prepare for the next world by abusing their neighbours in this. On this one point, however, the Sketcher was immovable; and declining steadfastly to reveal the reason of his obduracy, he succeeded in exciting the curiosity of the Doves, and, as a matter of course, from this moment carried his point. Driving then from Pompey's Pillar to the Canal, they passed along the shady banks to the east, and were repaid by the beauties of a drive which is perhaps unsurpassable in Cairo itself. The Scribbler indeed refused to be charmed; the Canal to him was nothing but the grave of the 20,000 lives which had been sacrificed to digging it; in the beauties of light and shade he detected rheumatism; beneath the brightest foliage lurked malaria; and in a baker's shop, which the Sketcher styled picturesque, he found only a hot-bed of cholera.

Leaving the Canal with its gardens, the road turned sharp to the north, and passing between a couple of small lakes, reached the continuation of the old Canopic road, already described. Again turning eastward, it led across the Desert, past the hideous modern palace of Ramleh, built on the site and from the very stones of Cæsar's camp at Nicopolis-the scene of the victories of Octavianus over Mark Antony, and of Abercromby over the French. Another mile brought the party to the Beau Mer, an hotel apparently designed to attract from without and to repel from within. The Sketcher, in pursuit of his mysterious purpose, had desired to be introduced to the oldest inhabitant of Nicopolis; and the Scribbler thought that he knew one man, who, from the patient

endurance of his disposition, might still have been able to support existence in the hotel. "He is," he explained, "a judge; but it is fair to state, in extenuation, that being an Anglo-Egyptian judge, he is naturally debased by no technical knowledge, and is as necessarily unpractical and unworldly wise. Were it otherwise, he would not have been appointed to the position, nor would he have accepted it. On the other hand, he is socially charming; will recite Tennyson and Swinburne by the hour, which will please you; and is

utterly ignorant of the country, which is an advantage for me.” The judge did not belie his reputation; he had been editor of a newspaper, secretary to a Duke -everything except a judge, and was therefore all that could be desired for the Egyptian bench. In gentle, uncomplaining tones, he stated the one hardship of his lot-that for three days in the week, during nine months of the year, he had to sit for four hours in a court where the noisy arguments of counsel disturbed all the charm of conversation with his colleagues "some of whom, I must admit," he added, "take their duties much too seriously, and, in fact, are as solemn as if they were beneficed clergymen of the Church of England."

"Are they all English?" asked the Sketcher.

"No," said the judge; "many

of them are of your country, and of other nationalities. intelligence of five nations to try every petty case.

It requires the united
You see," he added

solemnly, "the balance of power in Europe might be disturbed if an Englishman or Frenchman alone were to decide a question of five pounds between Ali Mahomet and Spiro Dimitri. So the other great Powers must be represented too; and Greece, because Spiro is a Greek, and Egypt, because Ali is an