Cairo

CAIRO (ki'ro), EGYPT. In the 4,000 years of ancient Egypt, and in the Hellenistic and Roman days, there was no Cairo. Yet this city, which was born only after Christianity had been in existence almost a thousand years, is today the largest city in Africa and second only to Constantinople in the country about the eastern Mediterranean.

At the time of the Arab conquest of Egypt, in the 7th century A.D., the victorious general of Omar, the second caliph, cried out as he en tered Alexandria: " Behold a city made ready for us!" But his master asked, " Will there be water between me and the army of the Muslims?" And when the answer was " Yes, 0 Commander of the Faithful; there will be the Nile," the general was bidden to choose another site for his capital, lest the inundations of that great river should cut off communi cations with Arabia, the center of Mohammedan power. He selected a site on the east bank of the river, 130 miles southeast of Alexandria, and there he founded El-Fostat which later was called Old Cairo.

Then, in the course of civil wars among the Moham medans, the Fatimite dynasty conquered Egypt, and El-Fostat was pillaged and destroyed. So in 968 a new capital was laid out, a little to the north, called El-Kahira (" the victorious"), a name since corrupted into " Cairo." Thus was founded the city famed in the ' Arabian Nights', destined to be throughout the later Middle Ages the center of trade between Europe and the East, and a seat of Mohammedan learning.

From the height of the citadel— built by the great Saracen leader Saladin, in the 12th century—we may look down upon Cairo's ancient walls and lofty towers. We behold its many famous mosques, with their delicately carved domes and fan tastic minarets; and in their midst we see the great Mohammedan uni versity of nearly 8,000 students, founded in 971. The winding streets of the oriental quarter are filled with high narrow houses with projecting upper stories, from which jut lattice work windows, like elaborate bird cages, that almost meet across the narrow ways. In the busy bazaars merchants sit cross-legged before their shop fronts, selling their wares to the everchanging and many colored throng of passers-by. And

beyond this picture of the East we see the European quarter, lying along the broad island-studded Nile; while to the north ten miles distant towers the Great Pyramid against the horizon, and to the east the peaks of barren cliffs outline sharply the brown sand wastes of the desert. Population, about 800,000.

Cairo was taken by the Turks in 1517. In 1798 it was captured by the French, from whom it passed again under Turkish rule. It is now the head of the British protectorate in Egypt, as well as the capital of the Sultan. The inhabitants are of many races—Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Italians, British, French, Copts, Jews, etc. In medieval times great gates, which were closed at night, separated the different quarters.

The commerce of Cairo is extensive. Gum, ivory, hides, and ostrich feathers from the Sudan, cotton and sugar from upper Egypt, indigo and shawls from India and Persia, sheep and tobacco from Asiatic Turkey, and a great variety of European products pass through the city. Its chief manufactures are cotton goods and paper.

Cairo is the northern terminus of the Cape-to-Cairo Rail way, that gigantic project of Cecil Rhodes for crossing Africa from north to south with perhaps the longest railway in the world. The rail line crossing the Suez Canal at Kantara goes to Jerusalem in Palestine.

that the traveler has ever seen is quite like Cairo—if he has never been to India or Damascus or Constantinople.

The color of Cairo is something the traveler never forgets, with its panorama of human life which never ends ; the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of lives which nothing seems ever to perturb ; the glow of the city in the sun from the height of the citadel, with its miles of domes and minarets; the population moving like ants on a hillside, with the river which brings life to Egypt winding in the back ground; and far beyond, ten miles or more from where he stands, the Pyramids and the desert. One wonders if there are six scenes in the world so vast, so solemn, so thrilling, as this city on the edge of the desert, in the glare of the noonday sun.