The adjoining church of Sta. Fosca is hardly less interesting. An octagonal case, with apses at the eastern end, supports a circular drum, which is covered by a low conical roof, and a cloister or corridor surrounds the greater part of the church. This adds much to the beauty of the design, the idea, as Fergusson remarks, being evidently borrowed from the circular colonnades of the Roman temples. He also justly praises the beauty of the interior. In this church also, which in its present condition is not so old as the cathedral, the materials of a much older building or buildings have been employed. But over these details or the mosaics in the cathedral we must not linger, and must only pause to mention the curious stone chair in the adjacent court which bears the name of the throne of Attila; perhaps, like the chair of the Dukes of Corinthia, it was the ancient seat of the chief magistrate of the island. XI ALEXANDRIA The bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta--Peculiar shape of the city--Strange and varied picture of Alexandrian street life--The Place Mehemet Ali--Glorious panorama from the Cairo citadel--Pompey's Pillar--The Battle of the Nile--Discovery of the famous inscribed stone at Rosetta--Port Said and the Suez Canal. It is with a keen sense of disappointment that the traveller first sights the monotonous and dreary-looking Egyptian sea-board. The low ridges of desolate sandhills, occasionally broken by equally unattractive lagunes, form a melancholy contrast to the beautiful scenery of the North African littoral farther west, which delighted his eyes a short time before, while skirting the Algerian coast. What a change from the thickly-wooded hills gently sloping upwards from the water's edge to the lower ridges of the Atlas range, whose snow-clad peaks stand out clear in the brilliant atmosphere, the landscape diversified with cornfields and olive groves, and thickly studded with white farmhouses, looking in the distance but white specks, and glittering like diamonds under the glowing rays of the sun. Now, instead of all this warmth of color and variety of outline, one is confronted by the bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta. If the expectant traveller is so disenchanted with his first view of Egypt from the sea, still greater is his disappointment as the ship approaches the harbor. This bustling and painfully modern-looking town--the city of the great Alexander, and the gate of that land of oriental romance and fascinating association--might, but for an occasional palm-tree or minaret standing out among the mass of European buildings, be mistaken for some flourishing European port, say a Marseilles or Havre plumped down on the Egyptian plain.