It is only four weeks this very day since I took leave of
you in Albemarle Street, and here I am within a couple of hours’ sail of
Grand Cairo, and in sight of those stupendous monuments of folly, the Pyramids
of Egypt, which, as my favourite author Gibbon has it, “still stand erect and unshaken above
the floods of the Nile, after an hundred generations and the leaves of
autumn have dropped into the grave.” I cannot believe myself so
far distant from the saloons of London, but the moment I reached Alexandria the
line of demarcation was too apparent, the transition from civilization to
barbarism was instantaneous, and we received before quitting the steamer the
astounding intelligence that 15,000 human beings had died of plague within the
last three months, and that 129 had perished on the preceding day in the
isolated town of Alexandria. My fellow-passengers and myself tumbled
| 394 | MEMOIRS OF JOHN MURRAY |
Having thus landed in Egypt in twenty-two days, a month, or rather six weeks, may be spent in visiting Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and by availing myself of the packet after the next it would be quite possible to be in London in three months!! One author—I forget his name—gives his book the name of ‘Dates and Distances, showing what may be done,’ &c. in a certain time. He does not outdo this, which ought to tempt some of the thousand and one tourists who wish to write a “book for next season,” and sigh for immortality as authors.
The Quarterly is lying before me, and, strange enough, I have been reperusing the very article which treats of Mahommed Ali in that able essay regarding the encroachment of Russia.* The Journal from which the quotations are made regarding the state and government of Egypt prove the writer to have been an accurate and an acute observer, but I do think that he has been too severe on the Pasha. To be sure he is a wholesale merchant and a wholesale oppressor, but compare him with his predecessors in this land of bondsmen, and then judge. From the very spot where I first beheld the Pyramids, Mahommed Ali has begun to dig an enormous aqueduct into which he is to turn the Nile after having bridged a new channel! the bridge is to be so constructed that he may inundate any part above the delta, and the river itself will be passed out
* ‘England, France, Russia, and Turkey,’ by Sir John MacNeill. |
| SIR ALEXANDER BURNES. | 395 |
P.S.—I go to the Pyramids to-morrow morning, and start in the evening for the Red Sea: quick work,—but not too quick—for 190 people died here (Cairo) yesterday of the plague.
