THE GATEWAY TO EGYPT

thousand Americans visit the Nile valley and that it costs each one of them at least ten dollars for every day of his stay.

When I first visited this country the donkey was the chief means of transport, and men, women, and children went about on long-eared beasts, with Arab boys in blue gowns following behind and urging the animals along by pok¬ ing sharp sticks into patches of bare flesh, as big as a dollar, which had been denuded of skin for the purpose. The donkey and the donkey boy are here still, but I can get a street car in Alexandria that will take me to any part of the town, and I frequently have to jump to get out of the way of an automobile. There are cabs everywhere, both Alexandria and Cairo having them by thousands.

The new hotels are extravagant beyond description. In the one where I am now writing the rates are from eighty to one hundred piastres per day. Inside its walls

I am as far from Old Egypt as I would be in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The servants are French-speaking Swiss in “swallow-tails”, with palms itching for fees just as do those of their class in any modern city. In my bed¬ room there is an electric bell, and I can talk over the tele¬ phone to our Consul General at Cairo. On the register of the hotel, which is packed with guests, I see names of counts by the score and lords by the dozen. The men come to dinner in steel-pen coats and the women in low- cut evening frocks of silk and satin. There is a babel of English, French, and German in the lounge while the guests drink coffee after dinner, and the only evidences one perceives of a land of North Africa and the Moslems are the tall minarets which here and there reach above the other buildings of the city, and the voices of the muezzins

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