Edwards, Amelia B.: A thousand miles up the Nile (New York, [1888])

CAIRO AND THE MECCA PILGRIMAGE. 29

world. The sons of the khedive drive here daily, always
in separate carriages and preceded by four sa'ises and four
guards. They are of all ages and sizes, from the heredi-
tary prince, a pale, gentlemanly looking young man of
four or five and twenty, down to one tiny, imperious atom
of about six, who is dressed like a little man, and is con-
stantly leaning out of the carriage window and shrilly
abusing his coachman.*

Apart however, from those who frequent it, the Shubra
road is a really fine drive, broad, level, raised some six or
eight feet above the cultivated plain, closely planted on both
sides with acacias and sycamore fig trees, and reaching
straight away for four miles out of Cairo, counting from
the railway terminus to the summer palace. The carriage-
way is about as wide as the road across Hyde Park which
connects Bayswater with Kensington; and toward the Shu-
bra end, it runs close beside the Nile. Many of the syca-
mores are of great size and quite patriarchal girth. Their
branches meet overhead nearly all the way, weaving a de-
licious shade and making a cool green tunnel of the long
perspective.

We did not stay long in the khedive's gardens, for it
was already getting late when we reached the gates; but
we went far enough to see that they were tolerably well
kept, not over formal and laid out with a view to masses
of foliage, shady paths and spaces of turf inlaid with
flower-beds, after the style of the famous Sarntheim and
Moser gardens at Botzen in the Tyrol. Here are sont
trees {Acacia Nilolica) of unusual size, powdered all over
with little feathery tufts of yellow blossom ; orange and
lemon trees in abundance; heaps of little green limes;
bananas bearing heavy pendent bunches of ripe fruit; wind-
ing thickets of pomegranates, oleanders and salvias; and
great beds and banks and trellised walks of roses. Among
these, however, I observed none of the rarer varieties. As
for the pointsettia, it grows in Egypt to a height of twenty
feet, and bears blossoms of such size and color as we in
England can form no idea of. We saw large trees of it
both here and at Alexandria that seemed as if bending be-
neath a mantle of crimson stars, some of which cannot
have measured less than twenty-two inches in diameter.

* The hereditary prince, it need scarcely he said, is the present
khedive, Tewiik Pasha. [Note to second edition.]