We are apt to think that the only kind of charity is Christian charity. I find that there is a great deal of Mohammedan charity as well, and that many of the richer Moslems give money toward education and other public welfare work. The endowment of the El-Azhar university is almost entirely of this nature. Some of the village schools are aided by native charity as are also some high schools. A Mohammedan benevolent society at Alexandria raised fifty thousand dollars for an industrial school there. That school accommodates over five hundred pupils, and has an endowment of about four thousand dollars per year. In the industrial school at Abu Tig, founded and liberally endowed by Mahmoud Suleiman, weaving, carpentry, blacksmithing, and turning are taught free of charge. Towns of the Faiyum and Beni-Suef have raised money for industrial schools and the government gives assistance to twenty-two such institutions. There is also talk of a national university along modern lines, to be supported by the government. This university will be absolutely scientific and literary and its doors will be wide open to all desirous of learning, irrespective of their origin or religion. [Illustration: A house thirty feet square might rest on the flattened apex of the Great Pyramid, but originally it was much higher and came to a sharp point. All the pyramids have been robbed of their stones by house builders in Cairo.] [Illustration: “If you will climb upon your dining room table 250 times you will have an idea of my ascent of the stepping-stone sides of the Great Pyramid. At the base the huge blocks are waist-high.”] CHAPTER X CLIMBING THE GREAT PYRAMID On my second trip to Egypt I followed a telephone line in going from Cairo to the Pyramids and as I waded through the sands from the edge of the Nile valley up the plateau where old Cheops stands, I could see a party of foreigners playing lawn-tennis in the court of the hotel which has been built near its base. The next improvement in modernizing Egypt will probably be cable roads running to the top of these great piles of stone. Already a flagstaff has been planted on the very apex of the biggest of them. In driving to the Pyramids I passed along an avenue of acacia trees, the intertwining branches of which formed a grand arbour extending to the desert seven miles away. This splendid road was made in a few weeks by order of the extravagant Khedive Ismail Pasha at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal. He had it constructed so that his distinguished visitor, the Empress Eugénie, might drive comfortably to the Pyramids! It is built ten feet above the fields of the Nile valley and on each side the green stretches away to the north and south until it is lost in the horizon. One sees groves of palm trees, camels and donkeys, farmers ploughing and women carrying water, together with the other strange scenes that make up the oriental setting of this land of the Arabian Nights.