430 
EGYPT 
interested in the religious stories and traditions of the Arabs, and his 
cloth must be my excuse for quoting two of them. 
(a) When the Creator had made the Camel, he looked at it—and 
laughed. Then he looked at it a second time—and laughed again. 
(b) The reason why the Camel is the most supercilious of all 
creatures is this— 
Man knows the ninety-nine attributes of God, but one thing he 
does not know—the Ineffable Name, that graven upon the seal of 
Solomon— but the Camel does, 
Cairo and District, lat. 30° N. 
March 16th—April 18th, 1909. 
Cairo is of course a city of extraordinary interest, and it is interest¬ 
ing from many points of view, but as regards insects it cannot be 
termed a great locality, while as far as Lepidoptera are concerned my 
efforts were almost fruitless. 
Danaida chrysippus appeared to be over, at all events for the time, 
but, on the other hand, Ganoris rapae had come out since my first 
visit and was fairly common about the fields of Barsim, the Egyptian 
white clover; it was also to be seen in the beautiful gardens at the 
Barrage, gardens so highly cultivated as to produce nothing but the 
Small White and the ordinary form of the Honey-bee. On March 
30th, I saw a male of Colias edusa , in the garden of the Gezira Palace 
Hotel, where Mrs. Longstaff found a specimen of Spodoptera mauritia 
sitting on her parasol, and where Plutella maculipennis condescended 
to come to light. 
One day I took train to Matariya, about seven miles to the 
north-east of Cairo. Near the station a solitary Polyommatus baeticus 
was netted, and such common things as Polistes gallicus, Linn, (which 
also occurred on Gezira Island), Myrmecocystus viaticus , Coccinella 
11-punctata, and Epicometis squalidus , the last on Raphanus. How¬ 
ever, my objective was the Bev. F. D. Morice’s old collecting ground, 
the banks of the abandoned railway to Suez ; so I struck out to the 
right across the desert, but, owing to the early date, March 24th, 
and the , exceptional dryness of the season, did not find either flowers 
or insects very plentiful, moreover the wind blew as it usually does in 
Egypt. 
A few Synchloe glauconome, Klug, coursed swiftly along close to 
the ground ; a Painted Lady was the only other butterfly, and I saw 
no moths. The black spider-like Heteromeron, Adesmia dilatata, 
