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.
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