Portland Gazette, And Maine Advertiser

Character of the Inhabitants of Alexandria and Grand Cairo: by an Officer of Buonaparte's Army.

THE city of Alexandria has no vestige of its antiquity but its name. If it contain any wonderful things, they are buried and unknown to the people, who indeed have hardly an idea beyond the mere sense that they exist. Figure to yourself a being incapable of all feeling, taking events just as they occur, in whom nothing can excite admiration! who has no other employment but that of sitting before his own door on a bench, or before the door of some great man, and who thus spends his time without the smallest regard for his family or his children! Figure to yourself, also, a number of mothers covered with black tattered cloaks, offering for sale their children to every passenger; men half naked, whose bodies resemble bronze in appearance, wallowing in the puddles in the streets, and eating what they find there: houses of about twenty feet in height with flat roofs, the insides of which resemble a stable, presenting nothing to view but the four naked walls.—Such are the houses, and such the miserable inhabitants of Alexandria. Around this collection of horror and misery, are the foundations of this city, once the most celebrated for its antiquity, and the most precious monuments of the arts. Grand Cairo is a capital of a kingdom which hath no bounds, at least so the learned of that country describe it; it contains about 400,000 souls; its shape is that of an oblong trench, filled with houses piled one upon the other, without order, distribution or method. The people resemble those of Alexandria; like them they are most grossly ignorant; and his talents are considered with astonishment who is able to read and write. This city is, nevertheless, the emporium of a very considerable commerce: it is here that the caravans which come from Mecca and from the Indies end their journey.