EAELY STEAMSHIPS 225 
everything is attributed to St. Paul, and your father would 
have laughed had he had presented to him for sale (as I had) 
some fossil sharks' teeth, 3 inches long, as the teeth of the 
Apostle himself ! 
At this distance of time it is curious to recapture the im- 
pression made on an old naval man by the ' terrible-looking ' 
steamers among the white -sailed ships of all nations, the noble 
line-of-battle ships, and the smart frigates ; and the same 
epithet is repeated soon after when it is recorded that the 
passage to Alexandria was long, ' owing to contrary winds and 
a head-sea, which though slight, were sufficient to retard the 
Sidon, which despite her size and terribly grand look, is a very 
l)oor steamer or sailer, after all.' 
The Alexandria of 1847 was a ' ruinous city of dirty white 
houses straggling round a broad bay ' with ' outskirts horrible 
to a degree,' consisting of clusters of huts, or rather mud hovels 
not four feet high, grouped in squares about ten feet each way, 
with a hole for the door and another to serve as a window. 
Pompey's Pillar and the slave market were the two extremes 
of interest for the sightseer. 
But he found the Pillar, ' like all such attempts at effect, 
a failure, as the mind does not perceive at once the gigantic 
labour which the erection of such a single stone must have cost.' 
The sight of it added nothing to the impression gathered from 
books. The slave market was 
a small court about 30 feet square, surrounded with cells 
of about 12 feet, devoted to the slaves of each nation. These 
were dark and dirty, full of vermin, in spite of the smoke 
of a fire in the middle of the earthen floor, vv^hich all but 
suffocated the poor inmates. I saw only the Abyssinians, 
two or three squalid wretches, in the most abject state of 
dirt, disease, and suffering, from the smoke which inflamed 
their poor eyes. They said nothing, but crouched behind 
the door and up in the corner on my entering. 
The most agreeable episode connected with quitting the 
Sidon at Alexandria was Lord Dalhousie's expression of the 
friendship he had formed on the voyage for Hooker. ' On 
