orientalcairocit00sladuoft

35^
Appendix II
note by the same person, dated 973. We do not find that
Eastern authors have made any unmistakable mention of
this work as now known to us. They may have been silent
respecting it, because it is not written in the usual literary
style, and because to them it wants the strange charms which
so powerfully recommend it to the natives of the West, and
which have led such eminent scholars as Dc Sacy and Von
Hammer to discuss its literary history. I regret that the
opinions of these two celebrated Orientalists on this subject
disagree ; but as I am placed in the unpleasant predicament
of being obliged to differ from one of them, I am glad that
I have been led to accord with the former in some points, and
in others with the latter. Respecting the date of the work,
my opinion nearly coincides with that of De Sacy ; he
concluded that it existed about the middle of the ninth
century of the Flight, because he did not find coffee mentioned
in it; but on the same ground he might have assigned to it
a .somewhat later date, as the custom of drinking coffee did
not become common even in Yemen until the latter part
of that century, and coffee was first imported into Kgypt
within the first ten years of the next century ; some years
more elapsed before it began to be a common beverage
there ; and thence it passed, probably through Syria, to
Constantinople."
Kahira the Guarded
Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, in his standard work Cairo
(Virtue), wrote :
"When Edward Lane sailed from England for Egypt in the
summer of 1825, two months elapsed before he came in sight
of a ' tall distant sail,' which proved to be the well-known
Pillar of Pompeius the Prefect at Alexandria. Two generations
have passed since then, and a visit to Egypt is now an
ordinary Christmas holiday. People go to Cairo as they used
to go to take the waters at Baih or Tunbridge, and the
cataracts at Aswan are almost as familiar as Sandford Lasher,
Nor is it any wonder that Egypt every year draws larger
crowds of visitors to the banks of her broad river. No