Of the three streets that dispute the honour of being Alexandria’s
premier thoroughfare the Rue Rosette undoubtedly bears the palm for
gentility. The Bond Street (I refer to Rue Chérif Pacha) is too shoppy
to be genteel, and the Boulevard de Ramleh competes from this particular
aspect not at all. In its length, its cleanliness, and the refined
monotony of its architecture, Rue Rosette outdoes either of its rivals.
They are tainted with utility: people use them to get something or
somewhere. But Rue Rosette is an end in itself. It starts in the middle
of the town and no man can tell where it stops: a goal it may have, but
not one discoverable by mortal leg. Its horizon, narrow but
uninterrupted, ever unrolls into a ribbon of blue sky above the
wayfarer’s head, and the ribbon of white beneath his feet corresponds,
and right and left of him are the houses that he thought he had passed a
quarter of an hour before. Oh, it is so dull! Its dullness is really
indescribable. What seem at first to be incidents—such as the trays of
worthies who project from the clubs—prove at a second glance to be
subdued to what they sit in. They are half asleep. For you cannot have
gentility without paying for it.
The poor street does not want to be dull. It wants to be smart, and of a
Parisian smartness. Eternally well-dressed people driving infinitely in
either direction—that is its ideal. It is not mine, and we meet as
seldom as possible in consequence. But friends of a higher social
outlook tell me that, by a great effort, they can feel perfectly at home
in the Rue Rosette—can transform the municipal buildings into
Ministries, and the Consulates into Embassies, and arabias into
broughams, can increase the polish on the gentlemen’s boots and the
frou-frou from the ladies’ skirts, until the Rue Rosette becomes what it
yearns to be—a masterpiece by Baron Haussmann, debouching in an Arc de
Triomphe instead of a Police Station.
I have never been able to make that effort. When fancies do come here,
they are of an older and friendlier civilization. I recall Achilles
Tatius, a bishop of the post-classical period, who wrote a somewhat
improper novel. He made his hero enter Alexandria by this very street
one thousand years ago. It was not called the Rue Rosette then, but the
Canopic Road, and it was not genteel or smart but presented throughout
its length scenes of extraordinary splendour. Beginning at the Gate of
the Sun (by the Public Gardens) it traversed the city uninterruptedly
until it reached the waters of the Harbour (near Minet el Bassal), and
here stood the Gate of the Moon, to close what the Sun had begun. The
street was lined with marble colonnades from end to end, as was the Rue
Nebi Daniel, and the point of their intersection (where one now stands
in hopeless expectation of a tram) was one of the most glorious
crossways of the ancient world. Clitophon (it was thus that the Bishop
named his hero) paused there in his walk, and looked down the four
vistas, over whose ranks rose temples and palaces and tombs, and he
tells us that the crossways bore the name of Alexander, and that the
Mausoleum close to them was Alexander’s tomb. He does not tell us more,
being in search of a female companion named Leucippe, whom he deems of
more permanent interest, but there is no reason to doubt his statements,
for Achilles Tatius himself lived here and dare not cause his characters
to lie. The passage gleams like a jewel among the amorous rubbish that
surrounds it. The vanished glory leaps up again, not in architectural
detail but as a city of the soul. There (beneath the Mosque of Nebi
Daniel) is the body of Alexander the Great. There he lies, lapped in
gold and laid in a coffin of glass. When Clitophon made his visit he had
already lain there for eight hundred years, and according to legend he
lies there still, walled into a forgotten cellar. And of this glory all
that tangibly remains is a road: the alignment of the Rue Rosette.
Christian and Arab destroyed the rest, but they could not destroy the
direction of a road. Towards the harbour they did divert it, certainly;
the great thoroughfare contracts into the Rue Sidi Metwalli and becomes
heaven knows what in the neighbourhood of the Rue des Sœurs. But in its
eastern stretch it runs with its old decision, and the limestone and
stucco still throw over it the shadows that marble once threw.
Of the two gates there survives not even a description. They may have
been masterpieces of art, they may have been simple entrances, but they
must certainly have included shrines to the god and goddess who
respectively guarded them. No one took much notice of the shrines.
Paganism, even in the days of Clitophon and Leucippe, was dead. It is
dead, yet the twin luminaries still reign over the street and give it
what it has of beauty. In the evening the western vista can blaze with
orange and scarlet, and the eastern, having darkened, can shimmer with a
mysterious radiance, out of which, incredibly large, rises the globe of
the moon.
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