250 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
gold-embroidered shawls round their waists, and curious-looking 
foreign orders. It was always difficult to distinguish the servants 
from their masters, and the Dragoman or interpreter from both. 
Alexandria is a ruinous city of dirty white houses, straggling 
round a broad bay, with nothing but its antiquities and associations 
to interest a stranger. Pompey’s Pillar to the west of the 
harbour, and Cleopatra’s Needle to the east, are conspicuous from 
the lowness of the coast before the land is visible from seaward. 
There are a few fine ships of Mehemet Ali’s in the harbour, 
but he cannot man them; his palace is a large, tolerably well 
furnished, white square building, fronting the sea. Of trees there 
are scarcely any, except groves of Date-Palms, and afew Acacias; 
no herbs or shrubs, but in the wretched gardens. The soil is all 
limestone rubbish, blown about by the wind into your eyes 
already sore with the glare of the sun. ‘The outskirts are horrible, 
to a degree, consisting of clusters of huts, or rather mud hovels, 
grouped together in squares or quadrangles, not four feet high, 
each square about ten feet every way, with a hole for the door, 
and another to serve as a window. I went ashore about 2 P.-M., 
and was at once besieged by crowds of donkey-boys, so closely 
that I had to use a stick to keep them off, till I selected one, and 
rode to Pompey's Pillar. It is certainly a very remarkable 
object, the shaft being one piece of granite; but like all such 
attempts at effect it is a failure, because the mind does not perceive 
at once the gigantic labour which the erection of such a single 
stone must have cost. Of this and Cleopatra’s Needle I need 
say no more: they were exactly what I expected, neither more 
nor less, and any one can form a good conception of them, from 
reading the most ordinary account. I next went to the slave- 
market, and had to pay for admission into a small qua 
court, about thirty feet square, surrounded with cells of about 
twelve feet, devoted to the slaves of each nation. These wretched : 
holes were dark and dirty, and full of vermin, in spite of the smoke 
of a fire in the middle of the earthen floor, which all but suffocated 
the poor inmates. 1 saw only the Abyssinians, two or three 
squalid wretches, in a most abject state of filth, disease, and | 
