[Illustration: Among the upper classes an ever-lighter face covering is being adopted. This is indicative of the advance of the Egyptian woman toward greater freedom.] CHAPTER II THE GATEWAY TO EGYPT I am again in Alexandria, the great sea-port of the valley of the Nile. My first visit to it was just before Arabi Pasha started the rebellion which threw Egypt into the hands of the British. I saw it again seven years later on my way around the world. I find now a new city, which has risen up and swallowed the Alexandria of the past. The Alexandria of to-day stands upon the site of the greatest of the commercial centres of antiquity, but its present buildings are as young as those of New York, Chicago, or Boston. It is one of the boom towns of the Old World, and has all grown up within a century. When George Washington was president it was little more than a village; it has now approximately a half million inhabitants. This is a city with all modern improvements. It has wide streets as well paved as those of Washington, public squares that compare favourably with many in Europe, and buildings that would be an ornament to any metropolis on our continent. It is now a city of street cars and automobiles. Its citizens walk or ride to its theatres by the light of electricity, and its rich men gamble by reading the ticker in its stock exchange. It is a town of big hotels, gay cafés, and palaces galore. In addition to its several hundred thousand Mohammedans, it has a large population of Greeks, Italians, and other Europeans, among them some of the sharpest business men of the Mediterranean lands. Alexandria has become commercial, money making, and fortune hunting. The rise and fall of stocks, the boom in real estate, and the modern methods of getting something for nothing are its chief subjects of conversation, and the whole population is after the elusive piastre and the Egyptian pound as earnestly as the American is chasing the nickel and the dollar. The city grows because it is at the sea-gate to Egypt and the Sudan. It waxes fat on the trade of the Nile valley and takes toll of every cent’s worth of goods that comes in and goes out. More than four thousand vessels enter the port every year and in the harbour there are steamers from every part of the world. I came to Egypt from Tripoli via Malta, where I took passage on a steamer bound for India and Australia, and any week I can get a ship which within fifteen days will carry me back to New York.