I live on the great place of the Ezbekîeh, in the most handsome and populous part of the city. Formerly there was a large lake in the middle, but it is now transformed into gardens. All around run broad streets, parted off for riders and walkers, and shaded by high trees. There the whole East flits by me with its gay, manifold, and always picturesque forms; the poor with blue or white tucked-up dresses, the rich with long garments of the most various stuffs, with silken kaftans, or fine clothes in delicate broken colours, with white, red, green, or black turbans, or with the noble but little-becoming Turkish _tarbush_; then Greeks with their dandified _fustanellas_, or Arabian sheîkhs in their wide, antiquely-draped mantle: the children quite, or half, naked, with shaven heads, from which a single lock stands up on their bare polls like a handle; the women with veiled faces, whose black-rimmed eyes glance ghostly from out the holes cut in the covering. All these and a hundred other indescribable forms go, creep, dash by on foot, on asses, mules, dromedaries, camels, horses, only not in carriages; for they were employed much more in the Pharoahic times than now. If I look upward from the street, I see on one side a prospect of magnificent mosques with their cupolas and slender minarets shooting into the air, with long rows of generally carelessly-built, but now and then richly-ornamented houses, distinguished by artistically-carved lattices, and elegant balconies; on the other side my view is bounded by green palmtrees, or leaf-wealthy sycamores and acacias. In the far back-ground at last, beyond the level roofs and their green interruptions, there come forth on the Libyan horizon the far-lighting sister-pair of the two great pyramids, sunny amidst the fine æther in sharply-broken lines. What a difference to the mongrel Alexandria, where the oriental nature of the country and the mightily progressed culture of Europe still strive for the mastery. It seems to me as if I had already penetrated to the inmost heart of the East of the present. LETTER X. AT THE RUINS OF THE LABYRINTH. _May 31, 1843._ After my return to the camp at Saqâra, I required but three days to finish our labours there. I made a last visit to the ruins of ancient Memphis, the plan of which had, meanwhile, been completed by Erbkam; a few interesting discoveries closed our examination.