"I Am The Cock And Thou Art The Hen!" Is The Rejoinder,-A Tart One. "Nay, I Am The Thick One And Thou Art The Thin!" Resumes The First Speaker, And So On Till They Come To Equivoques Which Will Not Bear A Literal English Translation.

And sometimes, high above the hubbub, rises the melodious voice of the blind mu'ezzin, who, from his balcony in the beetling tower rings forth, "Hie ye to devotion!

Hie ye to salvation." And (at morning-prayer time) he adds: "Devotion is better than sleep! Devotion is better than sleep!" Then good Moslems piously stand up, and mutter, previous to prayer, "Here am I at Thy call, O Allah! here am I at Thy call!"

Sometimes I walked with my friend to the citadel, and sat upon a high wall, one of the outworks of Mohammed Ali's Mosque, enjoying a view which, seen by night, when the summer moon is near the full, has a charm no power of language can embody. Or escaping from "stifled Cairo's filth,[FN#21]" we passed, through the Gate of Victory, into the wilderness beyond the City of the Dead.[FN#22] Seated upon some mound of ruins, we inhaled

[p.85]the fine air of the Desert, inspiriting as a cordial, when star-light and dew-mists diversified a scene, which, by day, is one broad sea of yellow loam with billows of chalk rock, thinly covered by a film-like spray of sand surging and floating in the fiery wind. There, within a mile of crowded life, all is desolate; the town walls seem crumbling to decay, the hovels are tenantless, and the paths untrodden; behind you lies the Wild, before you, the thousand tomb-stones, ghastly in their whiteness; while beyond them the tall dark forms of the Mamluk Soldans' towers rise from the low and hollow ground like the spirits of kings guarding ghostly subjects in the Shadowy Realm.

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