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The tortuous, rough-paved streets, with their empty, gloomy porticoes; the ill-plastered palaces, with closed, discolored shutters; the little rambling square, with meager trees and stubborn grass; the Venetian garden-houses reflecting their crumbling graces in the muddy canal; the gardens without gates and the gates without gardens, the avenues leading nowhere; and the population of blind and legless beggars, of whining sacristans, which issued as by magic from between the flag-stones and dust-heaps and weeds under the fierce August sun, all this dreariness merely amused and pleased me.
Among a number of more or less ruined garden-houses on this bank of the river, there is one, a little beyond the Chînî-ka-Rauza, of especial interest, on account of the tradition which associates it with the Emperor Babar.
And among them, and as far as the eye could reach, up into the gorge between the hills, picturesque white garden-houses showed through rifts in the half-tropical foliage, or over hedges of prickly pear and oleander. Fig-trees, a hundred years old, made faded grey blotches amongst the vivid greenery; the pink bloom of apricot was stainless against stained-yellow walls.
The son of a renegade himself, he liked not that his followers should turn Turk upon his hands; which "was but picking his pocket of so much money to give a disciple to Mohammed, for whom he was remarked to have no extraordinary veneration. His farms and garden-houses were also under the directions of his own Christians.
The Europeans reside in handsome garden-houses outside the town. Among the objects of interest, the fortress with the palace is the most remarkable. It was built during the reign of the Sultan Akbar. It is situated at the junction of the Jumna with the Ganges. The fortress has been much strengthened with new works by the English. It serves now as the principal depot of arms in British India.
We passed through the Ezbekieh and by the suburbs of the town, where the garden-houses of the Egyptian noblesse are situated, to Old Cairo, where a ferry-boat took the whole party across the Nile, with that noise and bawling volubility in which the Arab people seem to be so unlike the grave and silent Turks; and so took our course for some eight or ten miles over the devious tract which the still outlying waters obliged us to pursue.
The plain on which the town stands, is bounded on two sides by the sea, and, beyond the town, is dotted over with pretty garden-houses: it is intersected in all directions by good roads, which are lined throughout with the prettiest of all hedges, composed of the dwarf bamboo.
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries.
The little Dutch eighteenth-century country-seats and garden-houses in which the national spirit took great delight are the fulfilment of a purely Erasmian ideal. The host of the Convivium religiosum says: 'To me a simple country-house, a nest, is pleasanter than any palace, and, if he be king who lives in freedom and according to his wishes, surely I am king here'.
Only as far as masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries.
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