One may differ as to the most appropriate metaphors, but all must agree that there are certain elements of beauty about the Delta landscape. Seen, as most tourists do see it, in winter or spring, the green fields of waving corn and barley, the meadows of water-melons and cucumbers, the fields of pea and purple lupin one mass of colors, interspersed with the palm-groves and white minarets, which mark the site of the almost invisible mud villages, and intersected thickly with countless canals and trenches that in the distance look like silver threads, and suggest Brobdignagian filigree work, or the delicate tracery of King Frost on our window-panes, the view is impressive and not without beauty. In the summer and early autumn, especially during August and September when the Nile is at its height, the view is more striking though hardly so beautiful. Then it is that this Protean country offers its most impressive aspect. The Delta becomes an inland archipelago studded with green islands, each island crowned with a white-mosqued village, or conspicuous with a cluster of palms. The Nile and its swollen tributaries are covered with huge-sailed dahabyehs, which give life and variety to the watery expanse. Alexandria can boast of few "lions" as the word is usually understood, but of these by far the most interesting is the column known by the name of Pompey's Pillar. Everyone has heard of the famous monolith, which is as closely associated in people's minds with Alexandria as the Colosseum is with Rome, or the Alhambra with Granada. It has, of course, no more to do with the Pompey of history (to whom it is attributed by the unlettered tourist) than has Cleopatra's Needle with that famous Queen, the "Serpent of Old Nile"; or Joseph's Well at Cairo with the Hebrew Patriarch. It owes its name to the fact that a certain prefect, named after Cæsar's great rival, erected on the summit of an existing column a statue in honor of the horse of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. There is a familiar legend which has been invented to account for the special reason of its erection, which guide-book compilers are very fond of. According to this story, this historic animal, through an opportune stumble, stayed the persecution of the Alexandrian Christians, as the tyrannical emperor had sworn to continue the massacre till the blood of the victims reached his horse's knees. Antiquarians and Egyptologists are, however, given to scoffing at the legend as a plausible myth.