Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/53

movement, mood; of everything, in short, which belongs to man and man's surroundings. This it is that makes the magic of the marvellous Eastern city for the Western eye. Splendour and squalor, the gracious and the hideous, stolidity and vivacity, dignity and frivolity, conflict and intermingle at every step. The mere confusion of races in its streets would be enough to bemuse the newly-arrived traveller. Gibraltar itself is beaten by it as a sentina gentium; nothing beats it that I have ever known or heard of, except Port Said. It is a perfect salad of nationalities, and a salad mixed by that "madman" who, according to the old recipe, should stir the bowl after the miser has added the vinegar and the spendthrift the oil. The babel of languages is positively Pentecostal. Parthians and Medes, Greeks and Arabians, dwellers in Mesopotamia and the parts of Libyia about Cyrene, are all represented here, and if the miracle of the first Whit Sunday were to repeat itself, the