If there is anything persistent in Gypsy tradition, it is the assertion that the Gypsies originally came from the banks of the Nile--that Egypt, in fact, gave them a local habitation and a name. Yet, curious to say, this is the country, and the only country, where a tribe of the Romá, preserving the physiognomy and the pursuits of its ancestors, has apparently lost its old Aryan tongue, or rather has exchanged it for a bastard _argot_, mostly derived from Arabic.[167] Nor does this phenomenon seem to be of modern date. A very rare Italian comedy of the middle sixteenth century, _La Cingana_, pronounced “Tchingana,” was expected to yield treasures of philological lore; but on investigation it proved that the Gypsies spoke only a corrupt Arabic. The following pages are mostly taken from the well-known work _Aegypten_, etc. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1860), by the famous Orientalist, Alfred von Kremer. As will be seen, he made a careful study of the “Zigeuner” or “Aegypten,” the “Ghagar”; whereas these interesting families of the Gypsy race, a people of wanderers, who have nowhere a house, and who have everywhere a home, are most perfunctorily treated of by Lane. “On the banks of the Nile,” says Von Kremer, whose words I shall now quote, as in other places, “the Ghagar men, like the Polloi of Herodotus, are tinkers, ape-leaders, rope-dancers, and snake-charmers; whilst the women are Áhnahs, prostitutes, and fortune-tellers. They are very numerous; they trade in asses, horses, and camels, and, as pedlars (Baddaah), they manage almost all the _petit commerce_ of the country. The Ghagar buy goods wholesale in Cairo, and frequent the two annual fairs of Tantá; that of May was instituted about 1853, and entitled the Maulid El Shilkáni (birth-festival of the Shaykh El Shilkáni), who is buried some three hours’ march from Beni Suef. Thus they not unfrequently become rich. “The Háwi[168] (snake-charmers) and the snake-eaters (Rifaijjeh) live at Cairo; and many travellers have seen the disgusting spectacle without suspecting that the Dervish’s frock covered the ‘tinkler.’ These classes are useful to the naturalist, as they have always a supply of live or dead serpents, with and without poison-fangs, lizards, uromastix, jerboas, jackals, wolves, ferrets (_Stinkthiere_), and so forth. They find and catch serpents with surprising dexterity: armed with a bit of palm frond to tap the walls and ceilings, and with a pipe whose tones draw the reptiles from their hiding-places, they rarely fail to make captures, as the older houses of Cairo are mostly haunted by harmless snakes. This proceeding of course awes the ignorant, and none dare to engage a room when the Háwi has declared it to be snake-possessed.