CAIRO TO KISUMU without eating. The rich often stay up for the whole night preceding a fast day, and by going to bed toward morning they are able to sleep the day through and get up in time for a big meal after sunset.

The poor are the best Mohammedans, and many of the more faithful are much alarmed at the laxity in religious duty that comes through contact with Europeans. A mis¬ sionary friend told me of a Moslem sheik who was offered a glass of cognac by a brother believer on a fast day. Shortly after this he met my friend and spoke of the in¬ cident, saying: “I don’t know what we are coming to. Good Mohammedans think they can drink without sin¬ ning, and this man laughed when I told him it was fast day and said that fasts were for common people, and that re¬ ligion was not of much account, anyhow. We have many infidels among us, and it seems to me that the world is in a very bad way.”

The Moslems have many doctrines worthy of admira¬ tion and the morals of the towns of Egypt which have not been affected by European civilization are, I am told, far better than those of Cairo or Alexandria. A traveller to a town on the Red Sea, which is purely Mohammedan, says that the place has had no litigation for years, and there is no drunkenness or disorder. The people move on in a quiet, simple way, with their sheik settling all their trou¬ bles. Mohammedan Cairo is quite as orderly as the part in which the nobility and the Europeans live. It contains the bazaars and the old buildings of the Arabian part of the city, and is by all odds the most interesting section.

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