footpath, wholly unprotected, and of steep
descent, lay our way. Some of the party,
mistrustful of their donkeys' fore-legs, and not
relishing the notion of a roll into the slimy
current below, an event which a false step would
render almost inevitable, dismounted; but the
doctor, confident that here, at least, his palfrey
was to be trusted, boldly led the way, and I and
one or two others followed, still mounted, down
to where a rude bridge crossed the water, and
up a yet steeper ascent to the top of the other
bank, where we waited until rejoined by the
walkers. Of course then came the usual salutation
of barks, snarls, and howls from the troop of
village dogs that had followed our course along
the bank of the stream for the sole satisfaction
of displaying these marks of ferocity—a
ferocity so allied with their usual cowardice,
that of the stones with which we acknowledged
their greetings only one went far enough to
reach its aim, and set the beast off yelping with
its tail between its legs. A few children, too,
arrived with the usual "Meskeen, ya sit,
backsheesh, backsheesh!"—a beggar, O lady, a
gift! The appeals, however, were unanswered,
and we proceeded over the sands, bound firm
and close in most places by a thin burnt
scattered herbage, and by one or two sorts of
creeping plants, lying close to the soil, clasping
it with fibrous fingers, and displaying little
yellow and purple tufty blossoms, till we reached
the remains, very distinctly visible by its flint
borders, of the ancient Roman road, leading
from the coast inland. A few paces further on,
we reached the excavations which are gradually
laying bare the site of the great city, the rival of
Rome, with her temples, and her palaces, and her
vast necropolis, where, by a strange contradiction,
the resting-places and remains of the dead are
in a far more perfect and recognisable condition
than the most magnificent dwellings and resorts
of the living.

And this was ancient Alexandria! A great
mound of sand, cut in parts into pits and
hollows, with narrow perilous paths between
them, by Arab fellahs, in the hope of finding
buried treasures, or to take the fragments of
marble—white, green, and grey—the blocks of
granite and red porphyry, the portions of fluted
columns, the capitals of acanthus-crowned
pillars, to build their miserable huts, or to be
burned for lime!

At the mouth of a newly-opened tomb we
dismounted, and, looking in, found it contained
the uncoffined remains of two bodies. I very
much wished to bring away the skulls, which,
as they lay, seemed quite perfect; but, on
bringing them out, they crumbled to pieces in
our hands.

All around were tombs; some half open and
perfectly preserving their shape, and even the
firm unbroken texture of their interior walls;
some fallen in; some filled and covered with
sand, bones, and fragments of granite and stone
dug out in excavating.

The Arabs have a great objection to touching
the remains of the dead, by which, being unclean,
they are defiled, and when they come
upon them, either leave them in the tombs, or
dig them into the sand with all expedition.

Lying in one of the pits was a splendid
granite sarcophagus, very large and deep, quite
intact, and with all its edges and the carvings
on its sides as fresh and sharp as if the chisel
had been but recently employed on them. How
I longed to possess that wonderful coffin! What
barbarism it seemed to leave it there, knowing
that almost infallibly its fate would be to be
broken up, and its fragments embedded in mud
for the walls of a hut no better than a pigsty,
or burnt for what lime could be made from
them.

Perhaps its great size and hardness (certainly
not its interest or beauty) may preserve it from
Arab greed till some one with my desire, and
with something very far beyond my means, may
secure it for some collection, public or private.

Leaving the hollows, we, carefully threading
our way, passed in single file along the crumbling
paths that intersect them, and reached the
highest part of the mound, beneath which still
lies buried the greater part of this portion of
the Greek capital. On the brink of one of the
deepest excavations we paused to look around.

Below, in tiers, along the wall-like sides of
the pit, yawned the niches where were deposited
the skeletons of old Hellens, the very forms
of whose white crumbling skulls showed how
perfect had been the type of the race that had
served as models for the works their own hands
have transmitted to us.

Two thousand years ago—more than two
thousand years ago—lived those men and those
women whose bones we now looked on and
handled!

Two thousand years!

Around us, spurned by the feet of asses, lay
portions of marble pavement, pearl-grey,
delicately veined, carved into radiated and
geometrical patterns, smooth and polished. Acanthus-
leaves, white and of glistening grain, each leaflet
rough and sharp, struck out boldly without
pattern, by an artistic hand, whose chisel-marks
were still clear and crisp; pieces of red
porphyry, white speckled, presenting here a smooth
and still slightly polished surface, there a rougher
side, to which yet adhered portions of the
cement that had united it to its sister block in
the inner wall, probably, of a palace.

And beyond all, the yet older, the unchanged
and unchanging sea, its dark waters moaning on
a low rock-scattered coast, beneath a heavy
lowering purple sky, streaked here and there
with the lurid red of a sun that had gone down
in anger.

I bore away specimens of all the fragments I
have described, and of some others as well, and
they now remind me, seldom without a sigh, of
that wondrous evening in the dead and buried
city, whose age it is difiicult to realise in gazing
on some of its relics.

Before I left Alexandria, Dr. S. made up
for my disappointment in the matter of the
skulls, by giving me one he had found at the