Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

34 страница из 66

It is not so long ago as to render it untrue now that Dean Stanley said, looking down from the Citadel: "Cairo is not the ghost of the dead Egyptian Empire, nor anything like it."

The interval elapsed since that reflection was uttered has, indeed, only deepened its truth. Cairo is becoming more modern every season. The "booming" of Cairo as a winter resort for Europeans was begun at the opening of the Canal by the Khedive Ismail. His ambition was the transforming of Cairo into a kind of Paris of Africa. The effort has not died with him. It has persisted with the official-set and their visitors. The result now is that in half an hour's ride you may pass from those monuments of antiquity, the Sphinx and the Pyramid of Cheops, in a modern tram-car, along a route which is neither ancient nor modern, into a city which blends in a most amazing fashion Europe of to-day with Egypt of a very long time past. There are wheels within wheels: at the foot of the Great Pyramid are crowded shanties and taverns such as you might enter in a poorer Melbourne Street or on a new-found gold-field; and the intensity of the contradiction in Cairo itself baffles description.