Alexandria was surely safe. In the first place the Arabs had no ships, and Amr, for all his courage, was not the man to build one. “If a ship lies still,” he writes, “it rends the heart; if it moves it terrifies the imagination. Upon it a man’s power ever diminishes and calamity increases. Those within it are like worms in a log, and if it rolls over they are drowned.” Alexandria had nothing to fear on the seaward side from such a foe and on the landward what could he do against her superb walls, defended by all the appliances of military science? Amr, though powerful, had no artillery. His was purely a cavalry force. And there was no great alarm when, from the south east, the force was seen approaching and encamping somewhere beyond the present Nouzha Gardens. Moreover the Patriarch Cyrus was back, and had held a great service in the Caesareum and exhorted the Christians to arms. Indeed it is not easy to see why Alexandria did fall. There was no physical reason for it. One is almost driven to say that she fell because she had no soul. Cyrus, for the second time, betrayed his trust. He negotiated again with the Arabs, as at Babylon, and signed (Nov. 8th, 641) an armistice with them, during which the Imperial garrison evacuated the town. Amr did not make hard terms; cruelty was neither congenial to him nor politic. Those inhabitants who wished to leave might do so; the rest might worship as they wished on payment of tribute. The following year Amr entered in triumph through the Gate of the Sun that closed the eastern end of the Canopic Way. Little had been ruined so far. Colonnades of marble stretched before him, the Tomb of Alexander rose to his left, the Pharos to his right. His sensitive and generous soul may have been moved, but the message he sent to the Caliph in Arabia is sufficiently prosaic. “I have taken,” he writes, “a city of which I can only say that it contains 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theatres, 1,200 greengrocers and 40,000 Jews.” And the Caliph received the news with equal calm, merely rewarding the messenger with a meal of bread and oil and a few dates. There was nothing studied in this indifference. The Arabs could not realise the value of their prize. They knew that Allah had given them a large and strong city. They could not know that there was no other like it in the world, that the science of Greece had planned it, that it had been the intellectual birthplace of Christianity. Legends of a dim Alexander, a dimmer Cleopatra, might move in their minds, but they had not the historical sense, they could never realise what had happened on this spot nor how inevitably the city of the double harbour should have arisen between the lake and the sea. And so though they had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch. She never functioned again for over 1,000 years.