CHAPTER III KING COTTON ON THE NILE THE whole of to-day has been spent wandering about the cotton wharves of Alexandria. They ex¬ tend for a mile or so up and downtheMahmudiyeh Canal, which joins the city to the Nile, and are flanked on the other side by railroads filled with cotton trains from every part of Egypt. These wharves lie under the shadow of Pompey’s Pillar and line the canal almost to the harbour. Upon them are great warehouses filled with bales and bags. Near by are cotton presses, while in the city itself is a great cotton exchange where the people buy and sell, as they do at Liverpool, from the samples of lint which show the quality of the bales brought in from the plantations.

Indeed, cotton is as big a factor here as it is in New Orleans, and the banks of this canal make one think of that city’s great cotton market. The warehouses are of vast extent, and the road between them and the waterway is covered with bales of lint and great bags of cotton seed. Skullcapped blue-gowned Egyptians sit high up on the bales on long-bedded wagons hauled by mules. Other Egyptians unload the bales from the cars and the boats and others carry them to the warehouses. They bear the bales and the bags on their backs, while now and then a man may be seen carrying upon his head a bag of loose cotton weighing a couple of hundred pounds. The 13