Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
flowers. Gentlemen played cricket on immaculate, rolled lawns. Even
the venomous snakes that abound in the island, Annie was assured,
had a proper respect for their imperial masters - they never at-
tacked Europeans. Her importunate host urged her and her husband
to stay for some hunting with the two packs of hounds kept in the
area. But by now the Brasseys were 'homeward bound and must
hurry on'. Annie does not tell us why their return to England was so
urgent but she does lament the fact that their stay could not be pro-
longed from a week to a month.
It was 5 April when the Brasseys left Colombo and they wasted
no time making for the Mediterranean by the new canal. They made
a very brief stop at Aden and reached Suez on the 25th. Here, like
many passengers, Tom and Annie disembarked and travelled over-
land to Alexandria, via Cairo. They had both been in Egypt in 1869
for the elaborate ceremonies inaugurating Khedive Ismail's engin-
eering miracle. Now they were interested to see the changes brought
about by Egypt's over-ambitious ruler. They noted the fresh fields
of corn near the capital on land recovered from the desert, the new
canal linking Cairo to the sea at Ismailia, the skilfully laid-out gar-
dens and parks, and the much-improved Shepherd's Hotel. But not
everything met with Annie's approval; she did not like the western
areas of the city, laid out by Ismail in imitation of Second Empire Par-
is:
or resident Cairo may be improved, but for the traveller, the artist,
the lover of the picturesque, the quaint, and the beautiful, the place
is ruined. Cairo as a beautiful and ancient oriental city has ceased to
exist and is being rapidly transformed into a bad imitation of mod-
ern Paris . . . Only a few narrow streets and old houses are still left,
with carved wooden lattices, where you can yet dream that the Arabi-
an Nights are true.
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