conspicuous among so many beautiful minarets and mosques by a dome of black iron set crooked on a whitewashed wall. Keeping well to the right, we avoid these sepulchres, but pass the European burial-grounds; that in which many English travellers are laid is very well kept and shaded with a number of fine trees, especially funereal cypresses. The wall round it is high, and it has a strange-I had almost said a pre-Raphaelite-look, reminding one of the old Campo Santo pictures in Italy, or the conventional pictures of a walled garden in a manuscript of Chaucer or Froissart. The heaps extend for miles in a southerly direction, and may mark the site of cities older by far than the tabernacles which Amer pitched on the spot in 638, and which supply a meaning for the Arabic name. This was Babylon, not indeed Babylon the Great, but the town which Cambyses is said to have founded, and whence, according to some, the Epistle of St. Peter was written. Whether Strabo, when he speaks of a Babylonian colony here, refers to the extradition of a number of families by the Persian king, or whether, as his words seem to imply, a much older settlement is described, cannot now be decided. In the twenty-sixth Dynasty there was a town here. It is curious, however, to note that other authors have spoken of the colony in very similar terms, and that it is sometimes ascribed to "Sesostris," or Rameses II., who is here said to have placed his captives from Babylon, and sometimes to Semiramis. The most recent writer who has touched on the subject is Mr. Roland Michell, and in his volume on the Egyptian Calendar, to which I am already indebted, a conjecture is mentioned which would account for the modern name of the Roman fortress at least. Kasr el Shama-or, as it is pronounced, "esh Shemmah" -is, in English, the Castle of the Flame or Light, and may mark the site of a temple of fire-worshippers. Be this as it may-and no more plausible derivation has been suggested-there are no Persian remains now to be seen at Babloon, and the unobservant traveller might very easily pass by the Roman walls half buried in grey mounds, though they would well repay, what they have never yet received, a careful survey. The western face now consists of a long wall of large stone blocks, under which a low entrance has been burrowed, leading into a very rabbit warren of miserable dwellings, Coptic churches, Moslem mosques, monasteries, synagogues, and bazaars, uniform only in dirt and darkness. To the ecclesiastical antiquary there is much worth seeing among the strange piles of mud and brick. Of the remains the most interesting is a church built in the eighth century, where they show in the crypt a kind of cave in which the Holy Family is said to have lain concealed during the flight into Egypt. A plan of the church is in Baedecker, but the best description is that contributed by Mr. Greville Chester to Murray's Handbook. Another church, appropriated to the members of the Greek communion, contains, far up stairs in one of the bastions, some of the most beautiful old tiles I have ever seen. There are also some very ancient ivory carvings and pictures, and a little stained glass. This church is dedicated to Sitt Mariam (St. Mary), and is locally called the Hanging Church, on account of its elevated position. The Roman antiquary will feel inclined to pass by the door and to trace as best he can the circuit of the walls. They would be of the highest antiquity almost anywhere but in Egypt. Here they are among the most recent of architectural remains. Continuing along the outer wall, two well-defined semicircular bastions, once pierced with arched windows, or embrasures, recall similar buildings at York, in London, at Trèvesanywhere, in fact, where the military engineers of old Rome built their fortresses. There is no mistake about the banded masonry, the thin bricks, the hard mortar, or any other of many marks by which Roman work may be identified; though high up, with the wall for a foundation, a tall whitewashed dwelling looks over, and seems tottering to a fall. This western front is perhaps two hundred yards long, and ends with another semicircular tower facing south. This tower is very perfect to a height of perhaps twenty feet, and is the first of a series of three, each some fifty feet in width, which range along the same side-the side, that is, which looked towards Memphis. If we climb the mound in front, the wide green plain with its palm-groves across the river stretches for miles over the site of the vast city, and the tombs of the inhabitants still cluster round the pyramids on the hill beyond. From the gate between two of the bastions, now sunk in ashes to the top of its pedimented archway, the soldiers of Cæsar watched the Nile and held the chief link in the chain which bound Egypt and Memphis to Rome. A few years ago there was still a trace of an eagle carved beside the arch, and everything is in a style wholly foreign, and different from the native Egyptian work. To the English archæologist this Roman castle is peculiarly interesting. Just as our Royal Engineers build a barrack at Agra and one at Armagh on the same lines and in the same style, so the Romans had but one general pattern for their pretorium, whether it was situated at Colchester or Paris, on the Danube or on the Nile. Just such a fortress as this formed the kernel of old London. Its foundations, with the banded masonry and the semicircular bastions, were discovered when the soil of Cannon Street was upturned for the new station. Long before the wall was drawn round the outer ring of suburbs, before the British London had become the Roman Augusta, a fortress which must have closely |