RASHID, or ROSETTA.
Near where Bolbitine formerly stood, is a populous modern
city, about two miles long, built in a tolerably handsome though
simple style, and hot disfigured by ruins like Alexandria. It’s
arabic name of Rashid is commonly softened by europeans into
Rosetta, or Rossetta. It is the commercial depository between
Alexandria and Cairo, and of all places in Egypt the most agreer
able residence for a foreigner. Pleasantly situate on the border
of the Nile; commanding a prospect of two beautiful islands a
little below the town, and a fertile country on the opposite bank i
skirted on the north by fields covered with odoriferous flowers,
grateful fruits, and useful vegetables; the stranger may walk unmolested
through the streets abounding with well filled shops, or
into the delicious gardens that adjoin the city. I t is perfectly
open, having no wall; and the houses are built more in the euro-
pean manner than those of the rest of Egypt, having a regular
succession of stories one above another. Many of the houses are
raised on a row of columns, a few feet in height, consisting of
fragments of ancient pillars of all sorts and kinds. Some of them
have no base, some no capital. Sometimes you will see the upper
parts of two pillars of different orders joined together, the inverted
capital of one of them serving as a base to the new made column;
and if either of them happen to have been fractured obliquely, the
modern architect, unequal to the task of reducing the surface to a level,
has filled up the vacuity with pieces of stone or brick embedded