CONCLUSION

A serious history of Alexandria has yet to be written, and perhaps the foregoing sketches may have indicated how varied, how impressive, such a history might be. After the fashion of a pageant it might marshal the activities of two thousand two hundred and fifty years. But unlike a pageant it would have to conclude dully. Alas! The modern city calls for no enthusiastic comment. Its material prosperity seems assured, but little progress can be discerned elsewhere, while as for the past such links as remain are being wantonly snapped: for instance, the Municipality has altered the name of the Rue Rosette to the meaningless Rue Fouad Premier, and has destroyed a charming covered Bazaar near the Rue de France, and out at Canopus the British Army of Occupation has done its bit by breaking up the Ptolemaic ruins to make roads. Everything passes, or almost everything. Only the climate, only the north wind and the sea remain as they were when Menelaus, the first visitor, landed upon Ras el Tin, and exacted from Proteus the promise of life everlasting. He was to escape death, on his wife’s account: he was not to descend into the asphodel with the other shades whom Hermes conducts, himself a shade. Immortal, yet somehow or other unsatisfactory, Menelaus accordingly leads the Alexandrian pageant with solid tread; cotton-brokers conclude it; the intermediate space is thronged with phantoms, noiseless, insubstantial, innumerable, but not without interest for the historian.