These conditions are typical of the New Egypt. Old Mother Nile, with her great dams and new irrigation works, has renewed her youth and is growing in wealth like a jimson weed in an asparagus bed. When I first saw the Nile, its valley was a country of the dead, with obelisks and pyramids as its chief landmarks. Then its most interesting characters were the mummified kings of more than twenty centuries ago and the principal visitors were antiquity hunters and one-lunged tourists seeking a warm winter climate. These same characters are here to-day, but in addition have come the ardent dollar chaser, the capitalist, and the syndicate. Egypt is now a land of banks and stock exchanges. It is thronged with civil engineers, irrigation experts, and men interested in the development of the country by electricity and steam. The delta, or the great fan of land which begins at Cairo and stretches out to the Mediterranean, is gridironed with steel tracks and railroad trains, continuing almost to the heart of central Africa. I find Egypt changing in character. The Mohammedans are being corrupted by the Christians, and the simple living taught by the Koran, which commands the believer to abstain from strong drink and other vices, has become infected with the gay and giddy pleasures of the French. In many cases the system of the harem is being exchanged for something worse. The average Moslem now has but one wife, but in many cases he has a sweetheart in a house around the corner, “and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” The ghouls of modern science are robbing the graves of those who made the Pyramids. A telephone line has been stretched out of Cairo almost to the ear of the Sphinx, and there is a hotel at the base of the Pyramid of Cheops where English men and women drink brandy and soda between games of tennis and golf. [Illustration: Cotton warehouses and docks extend for a mile along the Mahmudiyeh Canal connecting the port of Alexandria with the Nile River, and the prosperity of the city rises and falls with the price of cotton in the world’s markets.] [Illustration: Nubian women sell fruit and flowers on the streets of Alexandria to-day, but once their kings ruled all Egypt and defeated the armies of Rome. They became early converts to Christianity but later adopted Mohammedanism.] The Egypt of to-day is a land of mighty hotels and multitudinous tourists. For years it has been estimated that Americans alone spend several million dollars here every winter, and the English, French, and other tourists almost as much. It is said that in the average season ten thousand Americans visit the Nile valley and that it costs each one of them at least ten dollars for every day of his stay.