Part 18 (2/2)

A few e stopped before the steps of the Hotel Shepheard, which has a sort of veranda provided with chairs and sofas for the convenience of travellers who desire to enjoy the cool air We were received cordially, and given a fine rooh-ceiled, with two beds provided without upon the Ezbekiyeh Square

I did not expect to find Marilhat's painting before ed to the proportions of reality The accounts of tourists who had recently returned froer looked the same as formerly, when the waters of the Nile turned it into a lake in times of flood, and when it still preserved its true Arab character

Huge mimosas and sycae so intensely green that it looks al which are to be seen, side by side with the newer buildings, old Arab dwellings reat number of moucharabiehs had disappeared There remains a sufficient number of them, however, to preserve the Oriental character of this side of the square

Above the trees on the other side of the square, higher than the line of the roofs, are seen four or five minarets, the shafts of which, built in courses alternately blue and red, stand out against the azure sky On the right the scarps of Mokattaetation is apparent The trees of the square conceal the newer buildings, and thusan invalid, I had to be somewhat careful, and required two or three days of complete rest If the reader is fond of travel, he will understand how great wasthat labyrinth of picturesque streets in which swarms a vari-coloured crowd, but it was out of the question for the tiht that Cairo, more complaisant in this respect than the o to it, and as a h to do so

While my luckier companions started to visit the city, I settled myself on the veranda It was the best place I could have chosen, for even leaving out the people on the Square, the veranda roof sheltered o the fez and a short, braided jacket and full trousers; cavasses richly costumed in oriental fashi+on, scimetar on the hip, _kandjar_ in the belt, and silver-topped cane in the hand; native servants in white drawers and blue or pink gowns; little negroes, bare-ared, dressed in short tunics striped with brilliant colours; dealers selling kuffiyehs, gandouras, and oriental stuffs ypt and of Cairo, or pictures of national types,--to say nothing of the travellers the come from all parts of the world, certainly deserved to be looked at

Opposite the hotel, on the other side of the road, stood in the shade of the uests by the splendid hospitality of the Khedive An inspector, blind in one eye, with a turban rolled around his head and wearing a long blue caftan, called theave the drivers the orders of the travellers There also stood the battalion of donkey drivers with their long-eared steeds I ahty thousand donkeys in Cairo That nuerated

There are donkeys at every corner, around every mosque, and in the most deserted places there suddenly appear from behind a wall a donkey driver and a donkey that place themselves at your service These asses are very pretty, spirited, and bright-tempered; they have not the piteous look and the air of nation of the asses of our own country, which are ill fed, beaten, and contemned You feel that they think as much of themselves as other ani a butt for stupid jokes Perhaps they are aware that Homer compared Ajax to an ass, a comparison which is ridiculous in the West; and they also rein Mother of Issa, under the sycamore of Matarieh Their coat varies froray Some have white stars and fetlocks The handsoenious coquetry so as to s patterns which s When they are white, the end of the tail and the mane are dyed with henna Of course this is only in the case of thorough-bred animals, of the aristocracy of the asinine race, and is not indulged in with the common herd

Their harness consists of a headstall adorned with tresses, tufts of silk and wool, sometimes coral beads or copper plates, and of aup in front to prevent falls, but without any cantle The saddle is placed upon a piece of carpet or striped stuff, and is fastened by a broad girth which passes diagonally under the aniirth fastens the saddle-cloth, and two short stirrups flap against the ani to the means of the donkey driver and the rank of his custo merely of asses which stand for hire No one in Cairo considers it undignified to ride an ass,--old nitaries, townspeople, all use them

Women ride astride, a fashi+on which in no wise compromises their modesty, thanks to the enormous folds of their broad trousers which almost completely conceal their feet They often carry before them, placed upon the saddle-bow, a small, half-nude, child which they steady with one hand while with the other they hold the bridle It is usually woe in this luxury, for the poor fellahin women have no other means of locomotion than their little feet These beauties, as we may suppose them to be, since they are masked more closely than society ladies at the Opera ball, wear over their garments a _habbarah_, a sort of black taffeta sack, which fills with air and swells in the raceful fashi+on if the animal's pace is quickened

In the East a rider, whether on horseback or on an ass, is always accompanied by two or three footmen One runs on ahead with a wand in his hand to clear the way, the second holds the anis on by its tail, or at least puts his hand on the crupper

Sometimes there is a fourth who flits about and stirs up the animal with a switch Everywhich made such a sensation in the Exhibition of 1831, passed before me, amid a cloud of dust, and made me smile; but no one appeared to notice the comicality of the situation: a stout man dressed in white with a broad belt around his waist, perched on a little ass and followed by three or four poor devils, thin and tanned, with hungry h excess of zeal and in hope of backshi+sh, seeiven all this information about the asses and their drivers, but these occupy so large a space in life at Cairo that they are entitled to the importance which they really possess

ANCIENT EGYPT

The solemn title must not terrify the reader M Ernest Feydeau's book is, in spite of its title,In his case science does not mean weariness, as happens too often The author of ”Funeral Custo the Ancient Nations” desired to be understood of all, and everybodyand careful researches He has not sealed his ith seven seals, as if it were an apocalyptic voluht clearness, distinctness, colour, and he has given to archaeology the plastic forether materials in disorder, stones which are not , colours which are not turned into pictures? What does the public, for whoet out of so many obscure works, cryptic dissertations, deep researches, hich learned authors seeyptians--the comparison is a proper one here--masked the entrances to their toht penetrate into the in darkness endless panels of hieroglyphs which no eye is to behold and the key to which one keeps for one's self? M Ernest Feydeau is bold enough to desire to be an artist as well as a scholar; for picturesqueness in no wise detracts froenerally affect to believe the contrary Did not Augustin Thierry draw his intensely living, anihly true ”Stories of the Merovingian Times” froory of Tours? Did not Sauval's unreadable work becoo's hands? Did not Walter Scott, by his novels, Shakespeare by his dra life to dead chronicles, by putting into flesh and blood heroes on whoetfulness had scattered its dust in the solitude of libraries? Does any one suppose that the chroniclers of the future will not consult Balzac to advantage, and look upon his work as a precious reat would be the interest excited by a similar account, domestic, intimate and familiar, by a Greek or a Roments of Petronius and the Tales of Apuleius, which tell us ravest writers, who often forgetupon facts

In an essay on the history of manners and customs which forms the introduction to his book, M Ernest Feydeau has discussed this question of colour applied to science with ic, and eloquence He proves that it is possible, without falling into novel writing, without indulging in iravity and the authority of history, to group around facts, by the intelligent reading of texts, by the study and the comparison of the monuments, the manners, the customs, the books of vanished races, to show round to each event the landscape, the city, or the interior in which it occurred, and in the conqueror's hand the weapon which he really carried Ideas have fors, individuals wear costuy, properly understood, can restore to them That is its proper task

History draws the outline with a graver, archaeology must fill it in with colour Understood in this way, history ist, by an apparently paradoxical inspiration, has asked of death the secret of life; he has studied the tomb, which has yielded up to him not only the mysteries of destruction, but the customs and the national life of all the nations of antiquity The sepulchre has faithfully preserved what the otten and what has been lost in scattered libraries The to its sombre lips, has replied to the questions of to-day; it knohat historians do not know; it is i, apart froeneration, as it sinks forever under the ground, after having lived and moved for a few moments on its surface, inscribes upon the walls of its funeral dwelling the true expression of its acts, its beliefs, its customs, its arts, its luxuries, its individuality, all that was seen then and that shall never again be seen, and then the hand of man rolls boulders, the desert heaps up sand, the waters of the streaotten entrance to the necropolis The pits are filled up, the subterranean passages are effaced, the tombs sink and disappear under the dust of empires A thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years pass by, and a lucky stroke of the pick reveals a whole nation within a coffin

The ancients, differing in this respect fro their last dwelling The history of their funerals contains, therefore, the germ of their whole history But that history, full of intimatical, is not to be written like the other fore It is a how many years the author had to spend in study and research in order to write his book, to bring together his materials, to analyse and to co clearly defined what he y, the author enters upon his subject Going back to the beginnings of the world, he depicts the arief of man when for the first time he saw his fellow-man die The entrance on earth of that unknown and terrible pohich has since been called death is sole there motionless and cold amid its brethren, who are amazed at the sleep which they cannot break, at the livid pallor and the stiffness of the lins of decomposition become visible The body is concealed under leaves, under stones heaped up within caverns, and each one wonders with terror whether that death is an exceptional case, or whether the same fate awaits every one in a more or less distant future Deaths becorows older, and at last the conviction comes that it is an inevitable fate The rehosts in the wonders of dreams, the anxiety as to the fate of the soul after the destruction of the body, give rise, along with the presentiment of another life, to the first idea of God

Death teaches eternity and proves irrefragably the existence of a power superior to that of ration of the soul, in other spheres, in reward and punish to the works done bynations in accordance with the degree of civilisation which they had attained A the least civilised these doctrines exist in a state of confusion, reed with superstition and peculiarities Nevertheless, everywhere the mystery of the tomb is venerated

It may be affirypt It is a strange sight to behold that people preparing its to to yield up its dust to the eleainst destruction with invincible obstinacy Just as the layers of Nile enerations of Egypt are ranged in order at the bottoea and the pyramids of the necropolis, their bodies intact--for the worm of the tomb dare not attack them, repelled as it is by the bitter bituious devastations of man, that dead people would be found coht cover the earth Iered when it atteyptian civilisation had lasted ten centuries longer, the dead would have ended by expelling the living from their native land The necropolis would have invaded the city, and the stark es would have stood up by the wall of the hearth

You cannot have forgotten therestoration by a poet, in which archaeology itself, in spite of the progress it has made, would find it difficult to discover a flaw Well, what Victor Hugo has done for mediaeval Paris, M