The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the Citadel, and its twin minarets are the distinguishing mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous for miles above the city as is the dome of St. Paul's over London, and they are as light and graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The men on guard tie big yellow shoes on your feet before they allow you to enter this mosque, the outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster, over which you slide as though you were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is very beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it as to tramp in muddy boots over a satin train. The floor of the mosque is covered with the most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a sheet and as heavy as so much gold; alabaster pillars reach to the top of the square, empty building, and from these rise five domes, colored blue and red, and lightened with gilded letters. It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent, and impressive. It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance, disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think, until you have seen them several times, and have climbed to their top and gazed up at them from below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you had expected to appreciate them; but after they have laid their charm upon you, you will find yourself twisting your neck to take another look, or going out of your way to see them again before the sun has said good-night to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed over the edge of the world and found them waiting there.