In the morning you wake at some hour later than _réveille_, and gloat for a time that is indefinite over the luxury of a spring-mattress and of a day's time-table that is of your own framing--that shall be when you summon up energy sufficient to begin upon it. The city wakens almost as late as you. By the time you have bathed and dressed at exaggerated ease and meandered round to the Italian restaurant it is ten o'clock. Exotic Italian dishes are good for all their strangeness.... Across the peopling Square you get a car to Pompey's Pillar, towering above the Arab cemetery. The green mound bearing that granite column is an oasis in the desert of squalor about it. From the crest of the hillock you see Lake Mareotis spread out like a cloud in the morning mist--those shores now waste that grew the wine beloved of Horace. The old municipal guide totters up the slope and offers you below, through the Catacombs. You have seen the other Catacombs, beside the Lake, which alone are really worth seeing. He shows you the Roman mortuary-chapel in sandstone at the entrance to the galleries, lights up his candle-lamp, and you traipse after him through the labyrinth. The niches in the wall are robbed of their mummies; all epitaphs are long since gone--assuming there ever were any; there is hardly anything to be seen that is even symbolic. The old fellow mutters continually in a lingo quite unintelligible, except in short and isolated fragments. The linguistic accomplishments of many of the official attendants on the ancient monuments of Egypt are deplorably shallow. You notice it far more at places that are of far more historical importance than the Catacombs. The tombs of the Sacred Bulls at Sakkhara afford the most striking instance. A relic so bound up with the ancient religion as is the Serapoeum ought to be in charge of an attendant who not only can speak English fluently, but is beside alive to the import of his subject. The old dotard at the Serapoeum has no further English (obviously) than: _Sacra' Bool! Sacra' Bool!_ and _Bakshish_ and _T'ank you, Sair!_ The Catacombs _par excellence_, lie along the Rue Bab-el-Melouk south of Pompey's Pillar; but since we've been there before rather more often than once, they must be passed over. And so must a great deal else.