the raft with them to Cairo, they untie, sell them at the market, and carry the produce home in money, or in necessaries upon their back. A very poor œconomical trade, but sufficent, as they said, from the carriage of crude materials, the moulding, making, and sending them to market, to Cairo and to different places in the Delta, to afford occupation to two thousand men; this is nearly four times the number of people employed in the largest iron foundery in England. But the reader will not understand, that I warrant this fact from any authority but what I have given him.
About two o'clock in the afternoon, we came to the point of an island; there were several villages with date trees on both sides of us; the ground is overflowed by the Nile, and cultivated. The current is very strong here. We passed a village called Regnagie, and another named Zaragara, on the east side of the Nile. We then came to Caphar el Hayat, or the Toll of the Tailor; a village with great plantations of dates, and the largest we had yet seen.
We passed the night on the S.W. point of the island between Caphar el Hayat, and Gizier Azali, the wind failing us about four o'clock. This place is the beginning of the Heracleotic nome, and its situation a sufficient evidence that Metrahenny was Memphis; its name is Halouan.
This island is now divided into a number of small ones, by calishes being cut through and through it, and, under different Arabic names, they still reach very far up the stream. I landed to see if there were remains of the olive tree whichStrabo
