The Alexandrian night begins about 9.30. It is for that hour the opera overture is timed; then cafés and music-halls begin to be thronged. At one in the morning it is at its height. The opera may conclude at two; and after that is the supper, and after that the drive. Far the best way to see it all is to sit up in the diggings of your friend overlooking the brilliant Rue Ramleh from twelve on toward the dawn. There are sacred pipes and Alexandrian fruits, and other things; they include the conversation of the man who has lived in Alexandria a year and looked about him not casually, and who realises the import of all he sees in the pulsing street below. This is the fine side of Alexandrian night life. There is the sordid aspect, not good--_i.e._, pleasant--to look on nor to relate. Alexandria cannot compare with Cairo in lasciviousness. Perhaps no place on earth can, nor any under earth. For crude carnality you are to be commended to the Wazzia of Cairo; there the flesh-pots of Egypt are seething and steaming. Apart from the temperately-conducted biological friendships of the leisured French and Russians and Italians, the carnal traffic of Alexandria is limited very closely. It does not clog the alleys, as in Cairo, on every hand. Indeed, it is rather the pot-house and the tavern, where the sole business of the waitresses is to bring traffic in beer, that is the scourge of Alexandria. Their blandishments mostly are content with coquettish inducements to "fill 'em up again"; to achieve that they will perch on the knees of the soldiers and stroke their visages in a fashion not just maidenly, but effective in the eyes of the beer-boss. These taverns are at close intervals in all the poorer streets. There is always a piano, at least, and an employed performer; sometimes there is an embryonic orchestra--harp and fiddle--whose _répertoire_ is Tipperary and another--or perhaps two others. There is a continuous fierce roaring, which subsides only when a Tommy rises to sing. The pianist ramps out an improvised accompaniment. No pianist has ever been known to decline to make an attempt. Everybody joins in the chorus. By the time the chorus of the fifth stanza is under way, there is a rare drunken hullabaloo, and spilt beer and broken glasses. Ogling girls and flushed, embracing Tommies, yells for more beer, and drunken miscalculations of the score and feebly thundering band--all are checked with a parade-ground suddenness when the red-caps appear with their roars of _Nine o'clock!_ And the pot-house, so to speak, closes with a slam. The picquets are irresistibly strong and numerous. They parade in squads in half-sections, each under an officer. The Provost-Marshal, with a scrape o' the pen, has placed out of bounds most of the danger-zones which a year ago were open territory to the soldier.