DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.12664#0057
50
INCIDENTS OP TRAVEL,
From hence, passing around outside the walls, I
entered by the gate of the citadel, where I saw
what goes by the name of Joseph's Well, perhaps
better known as the Well of Saladin. It is forty-
five feet wide at the mouth, and cut two hundred
and seventy feet deep through the solid rock to a
spring of saltish water, on a level with the Nile,
whence the water is raised in buckets on a wheel,
turned by a buffalo.
On the 25th, with a voice that belied my feel-
ings, I wished Paul a merry Christmas ; and, after
breakfast, wishing to celebrate the day, mounted a
donkey and rode to the site of the ancient Heliopo-
lis, near the village of Matarea, about four miles
from Cairo, on the borders of the rich land of Go-
shen. The geographer Strabo visited these ruins
thirty years A. C, and describes them almost ex-
actly as we see them now. A great temple of the
sun once stood here. Herodotus and Plato stud-
ied philosophy in the schools of Heliopolis ; " a bar-
barous Persian overturned her temples ; a fanatic
Arabian burnt her books;" and a single obelisk,
standing sixty-seven feet high, in a field ploughed
and cultivated to its very base, stands, a melan-
choly monument of former greatness and eternal
ruin.
Passing out by another gate is another vast cem-
etery, ranges of tombs extending miles out into the
desert. In Turkey I had admired the beauty of
the graveyards, and often thought how calmly
slept the dead under the thick shade of the mourn-
INCIDENTS OP TRAVEL,
From hence, passing around outside the walls, I
entered by the gate of the citadel, where I saw
what goes by the name of Joseph's Well, perhaps
better known as the Well of Saladin. It is forty-
five feet wide at the mouth, and cut two hundred
and seventy feet deep through the solid rock to a
spring of saltish water, on a level with the Nile,
whence the water is raised in buckets on a wheel,
turned by a buffalo.
On the 25th, with a voice that belied my feel-
ings, I wished Paul a merry Christmas ; and, after
breakfast, wishing to celebrate the day, mounted a
donkey and rode to the site of the ancient Heliopo-
lis, near the village of Matarea, about four miles
from Cairo, on the borders of the rich land of Go-
shen. The geographer Strabo visited these ruins
thirty years A. C, and describes them almost ex-
actly as we see them now. A great temple of the
sun once stood here. Herodotus and Plato stud-
ied philosophy in the schools of Heliopolis ; " a bar-
barous Persian overturned her temples ; a fanatic
Arabian burnt her books;" and a single obelisk,
standing sixty-seven feet high, in a field ploughed
and cultivated to its very base, stands, a melan-
choly monument of former greatness and eternal
ruin.
Passing out by another gate is another vast cem-
etery, ranges of tombs extending miles out into the
desert. In Turkey I had admired the beauty of
the graveyards, and often thought how calmly
slept the dead under the thick shade of the mourn-