Siût, frequently written Asyoot, is the capital of Middle Egypt and has the best bazaars of any town up the Nile. Its red and black pottery is famous throughout the country; and its pipe-bowls (supposed to be the best in the east), being largely exported to Cairo, find their way not only to all parts of the Levant, but to every Algerine and Japanese shop in London and Paris. No lover of peasant pottery will yet have forgotten the Egyptian stalls in the ceramic gallery of the international exhibition of 1871. All those quaint red vases and lustrous black tazzas, all those exquisite little coffee services, those crocodile paperweights, those barrel-shaped and bird-shaped bottles came from Siût. There is a whole street of such pottery here in the town. Your dahabeeyah is scarcely made fast before a dealer comes on board and ranges his brittle wares along the deck. Others display their goods upon the bank. But the best things are only to be had in the bazaars; and not even in Cairo is it possible to find Siût ware so choice in color, form and design as that which the two or three best dealers bring out, wrapped in soft paper, when a European customer appears in the market. Besides the street of pottery there is a street of red shoes; another of native and foreign stuffs; and the usual run of saddlers’ shops, kebab stalls and Greek stores for the sale of everything in heaven or earth, from third-rate cognac to patent wax vestas. The houses are of plastered mud or sun-dried bricks, as at Minieh. The thoroughfares are dusty, narrow, unpaved and crowded, as at Minieh. The people are one-eyed, dirty and unfragrant, as at Minieh. The children’s eyes are full of flies and their heads are covered with sores, as at Minieh. In short, it is Minieh over again on a larger scale; differing only in respect of its inhabitants, who, instead of being sullen, thievish and unfriendly, are too familiar to be pleasant, and the most unappeasable beggars out of Ireland. So our mirage turns to sordid reality, and Siût, which from afar off looked like the capital of Dreamland, resolves itself into a big mud town, as ugly and ordinary as its fellows. Even the minarets, so elegant from a distance, betray for the most part but rough masonry and clumsy ornamentation when closely looked into. A lofty embanked road planted with fine sycamore figs leads from Hamra to Siût; and another embanked road leads from Siût to the mountain of tombs. Of the ancient Egyptian city no vestige remains, the modern town being built upon the mounds of the earlier settlement; but the City of the Dead--so much of it, at least, as was excavated in the living rock--survives, as at Memphis, to commemorate the departed splendor of the place.