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Roda Island and Moses 281
speculator to tear most of their beautiful villas and gardens
to pieces before he paid them the purchase-money ; and as
the slump came before he had time to clear out of his
gambles, they never did get the money, and no one ever
did build a mushroom suburb. Therefore a good deal of
Roda looks like a Sudan town which had a visit from the
Khalifa. But no matter. Roda will revive, for it has the
good fortune to be on the alternative route from Cairo to the
Pyramids, the only place to which the Cairene can drive to
take the air.
My first acquaintance with Roda was before its famous
bridge was opened. It was not a successful visit. Our
friend the Major suggested that we should try and reach
the nilometer on our feet instead of ferrying across from
the usual point at Old Cairo. As it was our first day in
Egypt, we did not know any better, and dismounted from
the tram with alacrity opposite a sort of wooden foot-bridge
which leads from the Mosque of Amr and its satellite Coptic
ders^ to somewhere about the centre of the island.
One of these ders^ after defending the little Coptic convent
in its core from Mohammedan outrages for unnumbered
centuries, had succumbed to the attack of the building
speculator, and its remains, in the form of mud-wall debris,
were being carried across the bridge by camels to make some
more building land at the expense of the Nile.
Those who are not familiar with Egypt cannot picture
any more than we could, before we tried it, the horrors
implied by this simple incident of modern civilisation. The
debris of a mud house is bad under any circumstances, when
it is dispersing itself in clouds of dust under the blazing
Egyptian sun. But when it represents the dissolution of a
building that may have stood a thousand years and been
occupied by Copts all the while, and those Copts at once
females and members of a religious order, the inferences are
unutterable. Nothing dirtier can be imagined.
The means adopted for sowing the accumulated vermin
with the widest effect was simple but efficacious. Each
camel had a box slung on each side of his hump. Most of