34 JOUHNET TO CENTRAL AFRICX.

CHAPTER III.

PICTURES OFCAIRO.

Entrance—The Ezbeklyeh—Saracenic Ilouses—Donkeys—The Bazaars—The Streets —Processions—Yiew from the Citadel—Mosque of Mohammed All—The Eoad to Suez—The Island of Rhoda.

Our approach to and entrance into Cairo was the illuminated frontispiece to the volume of my Eastern life. From the Nile we had already seen the mosque of Sultan Hassan, the white domes, and long, pencil-like minarets of the new mosque of Mohammed Ali, and the massive masonry of the Citadel crowning a projecting spur of the Mokattam Hills, which touches the city on the eastern side. But when, mounted on ambling donkeys, we followed the laden baggage-horses through the streets of Boulak, and entered the broad, shaded highway leading through gardens, grain-fields and groves of palm and banana, to the gate of the Ezhehiyeh—the great square of Cairo—the scene, which, at a distance, had been dimmed and softened by the filmy screen of the Egyptian air, now became so gay, picturesque and animated, so full of life and motion and color, that my dreams of the East were at once displaced by the vivid reality. The donkey-riding multitudes who passed continually to and fro, were wholly unlike