94 TOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

CHAPTER III.

PICTURES OF CAIRO.

%utrance— The Ezbekiyeh — Saracenic Houses— Donkeys — The Bazaars— The Streets — Processions — View from the Citadel — Mosque of Mohammed Ali — The Road 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 KzbeTciyeh — 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