of Rigoletto, and saw the minuet dance in the first act performed by a company of Parisian ballet-girls. It was the opening night of the new Italian Opera of Cairo, which has been built and inaugurated within eight months of the day when the first stone was laid. The state-box was occupied by the Viceroy and the Duke and Duchess of Aosta. Of the East there was no trace visible, except a few fezes in the stalls, and a box covered in with golden wire gratings, from behind which the ladies of the Khediveh's harem looked on the stage. In the morning the Doseh, in the evening Rigoletto-the Sheikh riding over a footway of bodies, the Viceroy gazing through an opera-glass at a European ballet. These things are no bad illustrations of the Cairo of to-day.

THE PYRAMIDS.

SEKHARAH, November 3.

A LONG, broad causeway, lined with acacia-trees, leads from the Nile to the Pyramids of Ghiseh. Substitute poplars for acacias, and you have the counterpart of one of the high dyke roads known so well to travellers in the low marshlands of Flanders. The ride through the avenue is a pleasant one enough, and yet there is something disappointing in the discovery that the journey to the Pyramids is as easy and straightforward a matter as travelling, say, from Ostend to Bruges. We had started-a party of four -in the early morning from Cairo; but what with dragomans, sumpter-mules, donkey-boys, and hangers-on, we formed quite a small caravan, and the delay in getting ourselves, our donkeys, and our attendants shipped across the Nile in an open ferry-boat, had brought the morning heat well on before we began our scamper over the Delta plain. The waters were still out, though ebbing rapidly; and on either side the road stretched broad, shallow

lagoons, dotted over with streaks of dry land, from which the waters had receded, leaving behind a rich coating of the black alluvial soil. Here and there, also, were patches of land lying a little above the dead level of the plain, which the floods had left uncovered, but which had been soaked and saturated by rills of water; and on these favoured patches there grew already rich crops of young wheat, verdant with a brightness of green, which even preRaphaelite painters, in the days of their early zeal, would have hesitated to portray on canvas.

In many parts the floods, which this year have been unusually high, had broken down the dykes. The embankment of the Cairo and Minieh railroad, which runs along the banks of the Nile, had been literally washed away in several places; and some idea of the strength of the current may be gathered from the fact that the rails, suspended in mid-air across the channels which the waters had scooped out, were bent and curved as if they were molten bars twisted by one of Nasmyth's steam lathes. The causeway, however, had sustained but little injury; and such damage as there was, was in process of rapid repair, so that the road might be in readiness for the expected visit of the Empress to the Pyramids. By the time of her Majesty's return there will be no break in the

road, and she will in consequence see nothing of the manner in which the thoroughfare was made good. About a mile from the Pyramids some two hundred feet of earthwork had been swept down by the inundation, and we had to be ferried over the stream. We had time enough, therefore, to see how public works are carried on in Egypt at the present day. The process is simple enough. Men stripped to the skin, and brown as the sand of the desert, stood up to their waists in water, driving stakes into the ground along the line of the embankment. Into the space marked out by these stakes, great sacks filled tight with earth were thrown, and over them were laid layers of heavy stones, and over the stones again more sacks of earth, till at last the surface of the breakwater, thus constructed, rose above the surface. Then on the top of the breakwater basket-loads of earth were poured, stamped, pounded, and trodden down, till at last the break in the embankment was filled up. So much for the system on which the road was constructed; it seemed to me a cumbrous and ineffective method of road-making; but of that I cannot speak positively. What is peculiar to Egypt is the method by which the labour is supplied. The bales of earth and the stones were brought down to the commencement of the gap by long strings of camels, which