Labrador looks at the Orient : notes of travel in the Near and the Far East / by Sir Wilfred Thomas Grenfell.

  • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
Date:
1928
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Labrador looks at the Orient : notes of travel in the Near and the Far East / by Sir Wilfred Thomas Grenfell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE ORIENT CHAPTER I FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EGYPT OUR first view of the land of the Pharaohs from the sea was much like that of Holland on a hazy day, or a mirage when there is much loose ice about on a Polar ocean. Pillars, like men walking, rise above the restless horizon only soon to disappear and be replaced by others, suggesting the procession of those great figures of history who through the ages had preceded us into this gateway to the huge river, the river of Egypt. Our imaginations pictured Neolithic galleys bearing the first mercantile mariners on record. Egypt, like Crete, might easily have been peaceful through the centuries before the Phoenicians and Greeks went a-pirating, for deserts on each side of them, and only negroes to the south, isolated them from all dangerous enemies. By the irony of fate it was they themselves who blazed a trail for their toes by making repeated war expeditions to Palestine and Syria. It was Greek seamen, however, whose shades rose most vividly to our minds as we peered shorewards. It was the Greeks under that gorgeous youth Alexander, who, while on his way back from the conquests of Persia and India, had licked up degenerate Egypt as a lizard would a fly. Here also the British under Sir Ralph Abercrombie in 1798 beat Napoleon’s forces and captured Alexandria. The city ahead of us had been many times the centre of the world’s interest. There was built the first university ; there the greatest library ; there the largest temple in honour of that composite god, Serapis. At that time it was the most important city in the world. Alas ! the university had been
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