Long before this he had 'done' Cairo, and seen all that was to been seen in that wonderful city, which, though less purely Oriental than Damascus, yet displays a more lively and varied kind of Oriental life than Constantinople itself; for there are still to be found the picturesque scenes and most of the _dramatis personæ_ of the 'Arabian Nights'--and found side by side with the latest results of nineteenth century civilization. 'The short quarter of an hour's drive from the railway station,' says M'Coan, 'transports you into the very world of the Caliphs--the same as when Noureddin, Abou Shamma, Bedredden Hassan, Ali Cogia, the Jew Physician, and the rest of them played their parts any time since or before Saladin.' A labyrinth of dark and tortuous lanes and alleys is the old city still--places where two donkeys cannot pass abreast, and the toppling stories and outshoots shut out the narrowest streak of sky; while the apparently masquerading crowd below seems unchanged from what it was when Elliot Warburton wrote of it a quarter of a century ago; 'Ladies wrapped closely in white veils; women of the lower classes carrying water on their heads, and only with a long blue garment that reveals too plainly the exquisite symmetry of the young, and the hideous deformity of the old; here are camels perched upon by black slaves, magpied with white napkins round their heads and loins; there are portly merchants, with turbans and long pipes, smoking on their knowing-looking donkeys; here an Arab dashes through the crowd at almost full gallop; or a European, still more haughtily, shoves aside the pompous-looking bearded throng; now a bridal or circumcising procession squeezes along, with music; now the running footmen of some Bey or Pacha endeavour to jostle you to the wall, till they recognise you as an Englishmen--one of that race whom they think the devil can't frighten or teach manners to.' Now the streets and the Esbekeyeh Square are dotted by redcoats; the trumpets of our Hussars ring out in the Abbassiyeh Barracks; the drums of our infantry are heard at those of Kasr-el-Nil; and the pipes of the Highlanders ever and anon waken the echoes of El Kaleh, or the wondrous citadel of Saladin, with the 'March o' Lochiel,' or the pibroch of 'Donuill Dhu.'