Queer Things about Egypt by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

Author:Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen [Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travelogues
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2019-05-19T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXII. Rosetta

ROSETTA, undiscovered by the tourist, is one of the most beautiful places in Egypt. As the traveller approaches it his hopes rise high, for the train takes him past lagoons, more gracious than those of Venice, in a setting of golden sand-hills and breezy palms. He is prepared in a way for the magnificence of the Rosetta reach. For sailing Rosetta has greater natural advantages than Assuan itself; the river is straighter and wider, the wind of the Mediterranean visits it nearly every day; it is also incomparably lovely, with its banks of palm-groves, enshrining mosques, and the white-domed tombs of saints.

I shall never forget sailing at Rosetta; we had served a strenuous apprenticeship for it; all the morning long we had tramped up and down the city, hunting out mediæval mansions, and the month was May, and the day was gloriously bright.

Rosetta is worthy of its graceful name—it is a rose among cities; there is nothing in Egypt like it except the cluster of old houses which survives from the village of Alexandria—a village of 5,000 souls a hundred years ago, turned by Mehemet Ali, with the magician's wand of a far-seeing autocrat, into a city of a thousand inhabitants for every day in the year.

To match it one would have to go to the Flanders of the Van Dycks: it is made up of old burnt-brick houses, recalling the Vieille Boucherie of Antwerp. The bricks being burnt confers much distinction on it, for Egypt is a mud-brick country. Cities have survived since the days of Rameses the Great, built of no more durable material than mud cut into ingots; but that was at Thebes and other desert capitals, where rain is as rare as rubies. Rosetta, like Alexandria, is climatically not of Egypt at all; it is a city of the Mediterranean littoral; in this favoured strip you have the scenery, and not a few of the flowers, of Sicily.

What of those palaces of Rosetta? They rise from colonnades that are purely ornamental; their heavy columns, pirated from Ptolemaic temples, are engaged, and yield but shallow and narrow recesses—mere statue niches, without their marble tenants. Above their colonnades are three storeys, each beetling over the storey below it with mediæval perverseness. One supposes that this was a device to console the ladies of the harem for the absence of the oriels of meshrebiya lattice-work, from which the odalisques in Cairo saw the gay festivals and busy working-days of the Gamaliya. There is hardly one such oriel in Rosetta, where all the numerous windows are filled with shutters of meshrebiya work like the panels in a mosque screen.

The basement colonnade must not be dismissed too lightly; it is often of great beauty and architectural ambition. It may have a portal, for instance, like the portals of Taormina, a bold rectangle which does not reach high, with ornamental brick work not seldom laid out in diamonds round the doorway, and a band of oak carried across the head of the doorway, engraved in antique letters with a text from the Koran.

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