EGYPT, GREECE, AND TURKEY -1888 -1889 437 



of their situations, and that he had taken refuge in Cairo, 

 where he was publishing, in Arabic, a daily newspaper, 

 a weekly literary magazine, and a monthly scientific jour 

 nal. I was much struck by one remark of his which 

 was, that he was doing his best to promote the interests 

 of Freemasonry in the East, as the only means of bring 

 ing Christians and Mohammedans together under the 

 same roof for mutual help, with the feeling that they 

 were children of the same God. He told me that the worst 

 opposition he had met came from a very excellent Protes 

 tant missionary, who had publicly insisted that the God 

 worshiped by the Mohammedans was not the God wor 

 shiped by Christians. This reminded me of a sermon 

 which one of my friends heard in Strasburg Cathedral, 

 in which a priest, reproving his Catholic hearers for en 

 tering into any relations with Protestants, especially op 

 posed the idea that they worshiped the same God, and 

 insisted that the God of the Catholics and the God of 

 the Protestants are two different beings. 



Among the things which gave me a real enjoyment at 

 this period, and aided to revive my interest in the world 

 about me, was the Saracenic architecture of Cairo and 

 its neighborhood. Nothing could be, in its way, more 

 beautiful. I had never before realized how much beauty 

 is obtainable under the limitations of Mohammedanism; 

 the exquisite tracery and fretwork of the Saracenic pe 

 riod were a constant joy to me, and happily, as there had 

 been no &quot;restorers,&quot; everything remained as it had left 

 the hands of the men of genius who created it. 



In this older architecture a thousand things interested 

 me; but the greatest effect was produced by the tombs 

 at Beni Hassan, as showing the historical linking to 

 gether of human ideas both in art and science the de 

 velopment of one period out of another. Up to the time 

 of my seeing them I had supposed that the Doric archi 

 tecture of Greece, and especially the Doric column, was 

 of Greek creation; now I saw the proof that it was 

 evolved out of an earlier form upon the lower Nile, which 



