Travel
Diary of Mrs. R.P. Eaton:
Europe,
Egypt, and Palestine, ca. 1857
Here I am, in “the land of Egypt” beyond the Mediterranean, the Great Sea of the ancients. Here lies the same land now in its general outlines and configuration as when Abraham saw it, and the successive Pharaohs and Ptolemys ruled over it. Through it the same river tracks its long course. The same fillous break on its lower margin. The same great deserts stretch away from the sides of its narrow valley of perpetual verdure, guarded by the same barren sentinel hills. The same warm sun is over it by the day, and the bright stars look down upon it as of old by night. Egypt is no utopia, no myth. Here she is now, though.
“A stain is on her glory,
And quenched her ancient light.”
My first day in Africa, in Egypt, Alexandria remains a curious and vivid
picture in the halls of memory. Our steamer had been waiting most of the
night outside of the harbor for the day—dawn and a pilot. The Egyptians
never do things in a hurry. At length the sun rode gloriously over the
minarets and monuments of the city, and we entered the harbor, January
16th. Now a lively and novel scene was presented. Little boats surrounded
us, and instantly a swarm of fellows, anxious to take us and our luggage
ashore, and to this or that hotel. Black and white with every intervening
shade and some with rich, flowing robes, and others with scarcely any
robes at all—with turbans and tarbushes—they pressed around
us, and in broken English and Arabic, most graciously offered their services.
From the windows of our omnibus—an incretion upon the kingdoms of
donkeys and camels, caused by railroads—we saw novel pictures and
fuses of life. Prominent in the view were those huge, ungainly, but useful
and patient animals,