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Roda Island and Moses 289
the Egyptian Venice, and huge gyassas were flying up the
Nile, looking like the great dark eagles of Egypt as they
spread their two vast brown wings before the strong north
wind. There was a shoal below us, on which we pictured
the stranded Moses, though the spot selected by Arab tradi-
tion, marked by a white tree-trunk on the inner side of the
opposite end of the island, facing the Kasr-el-Aini Hospital,
is a more reasonable place for a raft made of reeds to
strand.
We soon forgot about Moses, because at the end of the
palace there was a delightful loggia of five arches, almost
Chinese in its fantasticness, with a fountain sunk in the
middle of its marble floor. Inside, too, the floors of the villa
were of marble, and the ceilings vaulted and gaily painted in
such great airy many-windowed rooms. We lingered, too, by
a sakiya under a tamarisk, which a buffalo was slowing turn-
ing. The familiar groan of the sakiya was music to our ears,
and a bit of garden like that border of tropical flowers where
the hoopoos used to play at the Cataract Hotel at Assuan,
held us spell-bound.
From the villa we went to a mosque, with its woodwork
perishing, though not with years, which the loquat trees had
invaded, as we were finding our way to the nilometer.
The mikyas, an Arabic word which only means measure,
or nilometer of Roda, is the most beautiful of the many
nilometers we saw between Damietta and the Blue Nile. It
is not old enough to have been studied by the Pharaohs, who
never came nearer to Cairo than Ghizeh or Heliopolis. It
was established here at the beginning of the eighth century,
about A.D. 716, when Memphis was fast falling into decay—
perhaps for that reason—by the Governor of one of the
Ommiyad Caliphs, and has been repaired at different dates
from then to 1893. It consists of a square chamber, lined
with stone, sunk to the proper level. In its centre there is an
octagonal column which supports the architrave that runs
across it, and it has, on three sides, exquisitely picturesque
pointed arches rising out of the water. The masonry, at
whatever date repaired, has naturally the appearance of high
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